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(STRAIGHT) WHITE MEN CAN’T : THE DANCING BODY AS RACIAL AND GENDERED IDEOLOGY IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE FROM 1980 to 2018

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE

TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF DANCE

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BY

ADDIE TSAI, M.F.A.

DENTON,

AUGUST 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Addie Tsai DEDICATION

For B, the only person to whom I can confess I can’t dance a single step. And for J, who believed, from the beginning, I did indeed have what it takes.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to Dr. Linda Caldwell for her assistance, , and support throughout my doctoral coursework, qualifying exams, and dissertation process. Her guidance, patience, responsiveness, excitement, curiosity, investment, and openness have made this work what it most desperately sought to become. Thank you to Dr. Patrick Bynane and Dr. Rosemary Candelario for their assistance and guidance on this dissertation project from through the qualifying exams and the prospectus. I am especially appreciative for Dr. Patrick Byane’s willingness to serve on a doctoral committee outside of his department, and for his wisdom on canonical and profound texts and ideas I may not otherwise have found. I am immensely grateful to Dr. Rosemary Candelario for her guidance and support throughout doctoral coursework and the development of this project, and for agreeing to chair this dissertation committee at this late stage of the process.

I am incredibly thankful to the entire Texas Woman’s University Dance

Department, and especially to Professor Mary Williford-Shade, Dr. Rosemary

Candelario, and Dr. Linda Caldwell for their work as mentors during my time as a student and a Graduate Teaching Assistant. I thank Dr. Matthew Henley for his insights in the early developing stages of this journey and his willingness to serve on this committee at this late stage. Finally, I am truly grateful for the endless support and advocacy I received from my colleagues in the 2014 cohort: Robin Conrad, Mara

Mandradjieff, Mila Thigpen, Melanie Van Allen, and Lyn Wiltshire.

iii ABSTRACT

ADDIE TSAI

(STRAIGHT) WHITE MEN CAN’T DANCE: THE DANCING BODY AS RACIAL AND GENDERED IDEOLOGY IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE FROM 1980 to 2018

AUGUST 2018

This dissertation aims to chart an evolution of the (straight) White man dance , in which White men are presented in television, film, and video as either non- dancers or dancers in American popular culture from 1980 to 2018. In particular, this dissertation analyzes movement from White men in order to discern how dance in

American popular culture reflects gender and race ideologies. I locate the inception of this trope in ’s sketch in (1987), commonly referred to as “The White Man Dance” sketch, in which Murphy argues White people

“can’t dance.” I contextualize how this sketch emerges in part from the homophobic paranoia produced by the AIDS epidemic in the .

In order to thoroughly discern the ways in which these movement texts further gender and race ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this dissertation considers how the joint theater histories of minstrelsy and are instrumental in providing a model for ethnic mimicry in dancing, i.e. what it means to dance “White” or to dance “Black.” Vaudeville and minstrelsy provide not only an historical framework

iv for how these comic traditions could inform these choreographies, but also a cultural

foundation for how these current images of the White dancing male construct Whiteness

much in the same way vaudeville and minstrelsy images constructed ethnic .

Further, the intersecting theoretic disciplines of masculinities studies and gender

studies provide a philosophical grounding for the ways in which White men are represented in these audiovisual texts. Masculinities studies offers a deeper understanding of values placed upon masculinity in American mainstream culture, while gender studies offers an interrogation into how one performs reiterative gender norms.

This dissertation questions how these choreographies reinforce or subvert traditional norms of gender and race, placing the White male in a liminal space between

Whiteness and Blackness, masculinity and femininity. It offers an intersection of these ideas and attempts to illustrate how dance can be seen as the moving image reinforcing outdated or complicated modes of gender and racial identity within American popular culture.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

DEDICATION ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... iv

Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION “A VID OF ME DANCING LIKE AN IDIOT. I HOPE YOU ENJOY ALL THE STRANGENESS THAT IS ME.” ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1 The (Straight) White Man Dance: An Origin Story ...... 3 Three Roles, Three , Four Decades: Statement of the Dissertation Purpose, with a Few Necessary Disclaimers ...... 9 Man Up: Compulsory Masculinity and the (Straight) White Male Existence 16 “The Mask Which the Wears Is Apt to Become His Face”: Vaudeville Theater and Minstrelsy as the Blueprint for Racial Ideologies ... 18 The Art of the Gag: Physical as Dancing Engine ...... 20 “If There’s One Thing I Could Never Confess It’s That I Can’t Dance a a Single Step”: Notes on Positionality and Bias ...... 21 Whitewashing, Yellowface, and Asian Stereotypes ...... 24 The Scholar as Spectator, the Scholar as Other ...... 26 Something for Everyone: The Contextualization and Order of Acts ...... 27

II. NOTES ON THE PRODUCTION THE DANCE WILL TELL YOU HOW TO READ IT ...... 28

The Poem Will Tell You How to Read It: An Origin Story ...... 28

vi A Three-Tiered Methodology: Visual Methods Analysis, Choreographic/Film Analysis, and ...... 31 Visual Methods Analysis ...... 31 Choreographic and Film Analysis ...... 36 Postmodern Historiography ...... 42 Methods and Procedures ...... 45 Coding the Data ...... 46

III. PROLOGUE EDDIE MURPHY, THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WIMP ...... 50

Introduction ...... 50 “Love and Theft”: How Vaudeville and Minstrelsy Gifted Us Our Great Great Entertainment ...... 51 “Something to Hide”: AIDS, Reagan, and the Great American Wimp ...... 58 Greenface, , Whiteface: Eddie Murphy as Ethnic Mimic ...... 64 Re-Imagined as Old, Cranky, Hollywood Jew ...... 64 Eddie Murphy’s Blackface Slowly Fades to White ...... 69

IV. ONE, SCENE ONE “TAKE ME TO THE PLACE WHERE THE WHITE BOYS DANCE”: HANKS’S MANCHILD AND CARELL’S BUFFOON ...... 75

Introduction ...... 75 When Two Became One: How the Freed the Couple ...... 78 A Most Trusted American, a Most Likable Hollywood Star: .... 82 Tom Hanks as Soft-Bodied, Disarming ...... 84 Tom Hanks as the Favorite Manchild ...... 87 “Down Down Baby”: An Analysis ...... 91 The Power of the Maybe: Carly Rae, Tom Hanks, and Bubblegum Pop ...... 95 The Comedian Pretending to be a Buffoon: ’s Lovable .... 98 The Buffoon Versus the Hyperbolic ...... 100

vii “Slimming Down With Steve—Dancing”: An Analysis ...... 106 A Buffoonish Montage of Chaplin and Keaton: ’s Scott ...... 116 “Booze Cruise”: An Analysis ...... 117

V. ACT ONE, SCENE TWO BE A MAN: SWAYZE’S BEEFCAKE, SQUIER’S FALL FROM GRACE, BING’S , AND ’S ...... 122

But First, Let’s Talk About the 1980s: (Straight) White (Dancing) Masculinity: Patrick Swayze, , and the Female Gaze .. 122 and “Rock Me Tonite”: How a Dance Video Became the Scapegoat For a Rock Musician’s Career ...... 128 “Rock Me Tonite”: An Analysis ...... 133 with the Homophobia: Chandler Bing ...... 137 Chandler’s Victory Dance: An Analysis ...... 142 The Lonely Island and the Creation of a New Internet Evolution ...... 149 Slapstickian Humiliation and Viral Exposure: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping ...... 159 The Fall and the Blow: The Malfunction as Racial Indictment ...... 165

VI. ACT TWO, SCENE ONE “PRETTY FLY FOR A WHITE GUY”: HUGHES’S MODERN-DAY MINSTREL, RONALD MILLER’S AFRICAN TRIBAL RITUAL, AND NAPOLEON DYNAMITE’S TRIUMPHANT DEBUT ...... 172

Introduction ...... 172 Toes the Line Between Cultural and Racial Mimicry ...... 177 A Signifying Economy of Blackness in Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ...... 181 Weird Science: An Analysis ...... 181 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: An Analysis ...... 184 Duckie as Racial Commodity in ...... 186 How a Tribal African Ritual Can Be Mistaken for the Latest Dance Trend: Can’t Buy Me Love, American Bandstand, and the Privilege of Popularity ...... 193 “You Know This is For Real”: Ultimate White Boy Napoleon Dynamite Walks the Performative Tightrope Between the Sincere and the Cynical ...... 201 The Comic Power of the Abject as Other ...... 205

viii VII. ACT TWO, SCENE TWO “JUST BUMBLING AROUND”: GONDRY’S WALLFLOWER, THE JUSTINS’ WHITE NEGRO, AND JONZE’S ROBOTS ...... 220 “Everyone was dancing, of course, except for me”: , Indigo, and What the Camera Can Teach Us About Wallflower Men ...... 220 Mood Indigo: An Analysis ...... 223 Keeping Up with the Justins: Bieber, Timberlake, and Mailer’s White Negro ...... 227 Belieb Me, I’m Real: and His Brand of Andro-Masculinity ...... 229 “Somebody to Love”: An Analysis ...... 231 “It Don’t Matter If You’re Black or White”: ’s Racial Ambivalence ...... 239 “ and Tie”: An Analysis ...... 240 ’s I’m Here and Her as Cautionary Tales of Giving and Receiving ...... 247 Spike Jonze’s Her: The (Straight) White Male Dancer as Vulnerable ...... 251

VIII. EPILOGUE “C’MON, WILL YOU DANCE, MY DARLING? AND WE’LL GET THERE YET” ...... 263

The (Straight) White Man as Minstrel Performer and Puppet Master ...... 264 “We Can Dance If We Want To”: Reflections on the Current (Straight) White Man Dance in 2018 ...... 268 It’s a (Wo)Man’s World?: Reflections on the Future (Straight) White Male Dancer ...... 271 A Glimpse into the Future of the (Straight) White Man Dance: A Few Examples ...... 273

WORKS CITED ...... 277

ix CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

“A VID OF ME DANCING LIKE AN IDIOT. I HOPE YOU ENJOY ALL THE STRANGENESS THAT IS ME.”

Introduction

Although (straight)1 White male actor Matt McGorry first gained a reputation for his role as prison guard John Bennett in the series

(2013-2017) and quickly thereafter for his role as Asher Millstone in the ABC drama series How to Get Away with Murder (2014-2018), McGorry’s is promptly gaining as much attention from popular media for his reputation as a twerking2 White boy dancer

1 I include the adjective “straight” in parentheses to make reference to the ways in which the identifier “White men” has been employed throughout contemporary American vernacular and particularly in the twentieth century to assume a heteronormative as well as American White male identity. Regarding the trope “White men can’t dance,” a similar implication of sexuality has also been implied. Each time the phrase “White men” is used in this dissertation, it is meant with this assumption in mind. 2 It should be noted the White of —a popular Black vernacular dance involving using the hips to bounce the bottom in repetitive rapid movements while squatting low to the ground—is a recent development in contemporary American popular culture. Although it is widely argued twerking emerged in its current form from the bounce culture in the early 1990s, Ebony Wiggins argues twerking arose out of West Africa centuries prior: https://progressivepupil.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/african-origins-of-twerking/. However, the White appropriation of twerking, most notably by pop music artist , caused the dance form to erupt in popularity. For more information on this complex relationship between twerking and Whiteness in the American public, please see Kyra D. Gaunt’s “Youtube, Twerking, and You: Context Collapse and the Handheld Copresence of Black Girls and Miley Cyrus,” in the collection edited by Jacqueline Warwick and Allison Adrian titled Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity (2016).

1 and self-proclaimed feminist (Alter 2016) as from his television and film career. This introductory chapter borrows its title from McGorry’s own caption on a social media post

(Matt McGorry, post, August 22, 2013 [12:48 p.m.], http://www.facebook.com/ActorMattMcGorry) for a Vimeo video link (which has since been removed) sharing his own dancing with the public. In my opinion, this caption speaks to some of the ways White men perceive themselves and have been perceived as dancers. It is this intersection between White Men and dancing I aim to study in this dissertation.

It is my contention to explore the White Man Dance, which has exploded as a trope in spades since its American popular culture conception in the mid-1980s. The

White Man Dance particularly not only has its origins in comedy, but also is often explicitly used within American popular culture performance in a comedic vein. I read

McGorry’s caption as highlighting two striking poles of the White Man Dance as can be seen perpetuated and defined in and by its use in American popular culture: idiocy and strangeness. It begs the question: are strangeness and idiocy (or, perhaps, buffoonery) the only dancing interpretations left on the table for White men? What is it about the ideology of American culture that seems to leave little room for any other kind of expression attributed to the White dancing male?

Since embarking on this dissertation project three years ago, I began to observe a growing trend in the consumption of a dominant, (predominantly) American image of

White men moving across our screens. In my observation, the more politically tense our

American world has become, the more frequently viral videos of White men purposefully

2 (or so it seems) dancing like goofballs were shared, often tagged with some variation of the following caption: One thing that will make you feel better about today. What is it that makes us “feel better,” albeit temporarily, while watching the reigning figure of the

American patriarchal system dance as though he cannot dance, move as though no one him? Perhaps more to the point, I also began to observe a lack of variation of movement and quality in these White men buffooning and exaggerating their movements across American screens. In other words, perhaps to self-consciously point to the heterogeneity of the White male itself, these were becoming strangely , presenting what I sensed as the same comic viewpoint again and again.

When I would tell people of various backgrounds including education, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender about my dissertation project, I found it perplexing how many responded by telling me they felt the that White men can’t dance was a reality. The most response I received from those inquiring about my dissertation project was the following quip: But it’s true, though, isn’t it? The retort, oftentimes delivered via the subject of the phenomenon itself, a White male, imbued me with even more determination to further explore a ubiquitous trope often depicting White men as being unable to dance well.

The (Straight) White Man Dance: An Origin Story

In order to fully understand what set of cultural, racial, gendered, and historical ideologies gave birth to this curious phenomenon, I first sought to discover the White

Man Dance’s origin story. It is important to note the imperfection and inexactitude of locating a particular inception for a trope emerging from within American popular

3 culture. Due to the lightning speed at which American popular culture morphs and changes, exacerbated by the expected of an ever-evolving multimedia intersection of genres and forms, it is nearly impossible to pinpoint without hesitation the first text from which a particular trope emerges. However, for the purposes of this project, I will declare a starting point for the White Man Dance trope: a comedic sketch performed by (straight) Black male comedian Eddie Murphy in the stand-up

Eddie Murphy Raw (1987), a sketch referred to most frequently as the White Man Dance, especially after The Fresh of Bel-Air’s Alfonso Ribeiro labeled it as such when exposing his influences for the dance he performed repeatedly on the aforementioned show (Holmes 2015).

Although Eddie Murphy is certainly not the only Black American male comedian to imitate the supposed “bad” dancing of White men, it can be argued he is one of the leading contributors of the White Man Dance trope. , who rose to stand-up comedy fame during the 1970s and David Chappelle, who became well known during the early 2000s via his television show Chappelle’s Show, are two other prominent (straight)

Black American male comics who have mimicked White men for comic effect in order to explore the ideological structures of race and gender transpiring in America. However, more than others who contributed to the legacy of Black stand-up comedy, Eddie Murphy especially relied upon the impressionistic powers of body language, gesture, and movement to ideologically mimic and embody White men rather than vocal inflections associated with White men such as those employed by Pryor and Chappelle, among others.

4 In 1987, Eddie Murphy Raw was delivered to public through a wide theatrical release. The film made over fifty million dollars in profit at the box office (Box

Office Mojo 2018). The film’s wide reach is significant because the film gave the

American public access to a mocking White (male) bodies that would become an

American popular cultural phenomenon, a joke largely referred to as the White Man

Dance, even though it is important to note Eddie Murphy does not explicitly call out men in particular.

In the sketch, Murphy opens with the following observation: “I went to a recently and watched White people dance. Ya’ll can’t dance. I’m not being racist; it’s true. Just like when White people say Black people have big lips, it’s not racist; it’s true.

Black people have big lips, White people can’t dance” (Eddie Murphy Raw 1987). He proceeds to mimic their movements for the . It is Murphy’s representation of

Whiteface (Hannaham 2004) that became ubiquitous in American popular culture for directly informing many other of White men, including Ribeiro’s iconic dance to Tom Jones as the Carlton Banks throughout the 1990s television series The

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Contextualized by a stand-up career concretized and well-versed in homophobic content (explored further in the prologue), Murphy hit on an ideology already cemented within the fears of White masculinity emerging for men in the 1980s in America—those of homosexuality and effeminization. These fears were particularly potent given the rise of homosexual masculinity in the mainstream exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic in the

5 during the 1980s3. This ideological marking can be even further situated within Murphy’s canon if one takes a closer look at his explicitly antigay in other sketches he constructed and performed at that time, a sentiment but implied in the White

Man Dance based on the physical movements of his body in the sketch, further discussed in the prologue of this dissertation. In The Complexity and Progression of Black

Representation in Film and Television, David L. Moody borrows from E. Patrick

Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, when he concludes:

The Reagan-led conservative administration in the White House during the 1980s paved the way for the reemergence of “family values,” while simultaneously marginalizing those outside the heteronormative sphere of family including gays, lesbians, single working women and single parents. . . . Moreover, the insidious antigay pro-family sentiments promoted by the Reagan administration not only supported Whiteness as the master trope, but ironically also stimulated the career of a contentious Black comedian named Eddie Murphy. One could infer that Murphy’s stand-up character during the 1980s became another minstrel cast member at center stage for the fulfillment of White political . . . . Murphy had a large White constituency from the very beginning, and by adding homophobic dialogue to his repertoire, his stand-up act ultimately became commodified, and sold as amusement. (2016, 48)

In Eddie Murphy Raw, which opens with a sketch discussing his fear of gay men chasing him in anger due to the antigay he included in his previous television special Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983), the White Man Dance sketch thus can be read as burdened by an indictment on White masculinity, contextualized through a paranoia of homosexuality. As a point of comparison, one can note the difference in Murphy’s

3 Many AIDS scholars have addressed this relationship; however I find the episode titled “The Fight Against AIDS” in the documentary miniseries The Eighties, which premiered on CNN on June 9, 2016, offers the most cogent depiction of the ways in which the AIDS epidemic caused widespread fear of homosexuality.

6 depiction of White men when compared with his sketch featuring Italian American men.

In the sketch he compares Italian American men to Black men, even referring to them as

“n-----s,” while imbuing them with hypermasculinity in his physical impersonation, complete with an arched back and crotch grab. It is telling that in Murphy’s view, Italian

American men only visit nightclubs in order to get into physical altercations with other men, a gesture reinforcing their affirming masculinity, whereas White men attend nightclubs to fail at dancing—heads facing the floor, shoulders rolled forward, and arms swinging back and forth with snapping fingers, a familiar symbol also representative of the Black homosexual queen (Johnson 2003). In other words, Murphy employs gestures possibly signifying effeminization and homosexuality for the audience in order to criticize White men’s failure at traditional notions of American masculinity. The relationship Murphy explores between White masculinity and effeminization/homosexuality becomes even clearer when set apart by his hypermasculine depiction of Italian American men. By including in the same stand-up film a sketch of Italian American men, White American men who stand in as more ethnic than the generic White male, the generic White male dancer then can be read as further emasculated through this juxtaposition.

For better or for worse, Eddie Murphy pinpointed a very adept ideological relationship between White men’s relationship to dance and their subsequent fear of being marked as homosexual or effeminate, which risked taking White men further away from their relationship to masculinity. As can be seen from the plethora of resulting

White male dances emerging from contemporary American popular culture following the

7 release of Eddie Murphy Raw including his White Man Dance sketch4, the sketch enabled

White men to explore the relationship between masculinity and White men’s expected inability to dance well. However, in turn, Murphy’s sketch could also be read as helping to contribute to American popular culture’s reductive view of the White male dancer, one assuming White men could not dance, and those who could had a questionable hold on their ability to perform traditional expectations of contemporary American masculinity.

With Eddie Murphy’s White Man Dance sketch established as a starting point for the phenomenon regarding White men’s inability to dance, I next searched in vain for a genealogical text supporting the White Man Dance trope, but came up empty-handed. I also endeavored to understand the ideological relationship being constructed in American popular culture between dance and White men in terms of gender and race in particular.

Finally, I wanted to uncover the trajectories within American performance histories possibly informing the positioning of a popular viral tradition emerging from the White

Man Dance trope. Put more simply, I wanted to discern what trajectories informed the assumption regarding White men as non-dancers implicit in many contemporary

American popular culture images of White men moving, images seeming to proliferate after Eddie Murphy’s iconic sketch.

4 Alfonso Ribeiro’s Carlton Banks in the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990-1996), ’s Chandler Bing in the television series (1994- 2004), and Spike Jonze’s performance in the for the Fatboy Slim song “Praise You” (1999) are just a few examples.

8 Three Roles, Three Genres, Four Decades: Statement of the Dissertation Purpose, with a Few Necessary Disclaimers

With Eddie Murphy’s White Man Dance sketch established as a starting point for the trope that White men can’t dance, it was now necessary to create a container for the resulting trajectory explored in my dissertation study. Therefore, the overall purpose of this dissertation project is to analyze select choreographies of White men in American film, television, and video from 1980 to 2018 in order to explore the following question:

In what ways can dance be studied as a marker for how White men are represented and positioned within the gender and racial ideologies formed and refined on American screens in popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Further, the secondary purpose is to offer one possible genealogy of the White Men Can’t Dance trope proliferating in American popular culture over the last forty years. This research is important not only because the representation of White men has specifically been marginalized in current dance studies scholarship (Flood 2013), but also because it opens up new insights into how American popular culture images the White male archetype and how those images shift and are made more complicated over time. How bodies are represented in American popular culture can offer new connections for how gender and race are ideologically embedded in American culture.

I would like to begin by offering the following disclaimers regarding the dissertation’s focus and parameters. Although the project will rely heavily on theater histories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as vaudeville and minstrelsy, I have explicitly excluded theater as a specific of focus for a number of reasons. Firstly, I am particularly concerned with analyzing the American audiovisual

9 texts of White male characters and/or performers assumed by the general public to have had no traditional or formal dance training. Certainly, as cultural shifts occur, examples of which types of performances reinforce a man’s position within hegemonic American masculinity shift as well. For example, within twentieth-century American screendance history, one witnesses the earlier trend of the White dancing male, in which the performers are associated with virtuosic dance requiring professional training within the genre portrayed, be it the often artistic, effortless, but spectacular feats of or the more working-class, earthbound, weighted sense of ’s performance. This working-class image of masculinity portrayed by Kelly carries forward through the 1970s sexualized jiving of John Travolta to the 1980s feats of partnering lifts demonstrated by

Patrick Swayze. Between the 1970s and 1980s in American film the image of the working-class man shifts to the more recent trend of the comical (apparent) lack of control of movement demonstrated by White men who did not, in to the earlier dancers, make their living or name themselves as professional dancers, such as Pretty in

Pink’s Jon Cryer, the Lonely Island’s , Napoleon Dynamite’s , and The Office’s Steve Carell. Most White men associated with theater, however, are assumed to have received dance training as part of the skills necessary to perform on stage. Therefore, I consider White men dancing in theatrical productions as part of a different lineage than that read as part of the White Men Can’t Dance trope.

Additionally, I am specifically interested in uncovering the ways in which filmed audiovisual texts incorporate the White male dancing body for a mass audience. The

White Man Dance phenomenon seems to particularly impact a less nuanced audience

10 than one attending live performance, such as theater, , opera, and other types of live performance. The only recordings of live performance included in this dissertation project are those recorded and virally shared among frequent consumers of the White Man Dance trope, whether via online networks through social media or broadcast on live television, such as award ceremonies and late night talk shows. The relationship between the camera and the moving body in all of the audiovisual texts I analyze becomes a crucial device in constructing the White Man Dance phenomenon in that the camera (and the director dictating the camera’s framing in the recording of the dance sequences of focus and the dances’ placement in the larger work) creates a very particular direction for the viewer. The direction offered by the and cinematographer is one that is, simply put, impossible for a viewer at a live performance, an experience during which the viewer controls what exact element on stage will receive his/her attention. For these reasons, I omitted archival recordings of popularly consumed examples of the White Man Dance phenomenon in theater. However, it should be stated that this phenomenon has most certainly revealed itself in theater over the last four decades, and that theater has been an influential source for the growing proliferation of the White Man Dance trope, such as the 2013 Broadway of the 2005 film

Kinky and Young Jean Lee’s 2014 Straight White Men. It is my hope that the inclusion of the formative theater histories I will argue have led to the White men Dance phenomenon—namely vaudeville and minstrelsy—offer some vital ways in which theater, film, television, and video intersect to bring about the ubiquity of my conceit as explored in this dissertation.

11 Further, as stated earlier, the identifier “White men,” particularly when used in

American popular culture in the twentieth century, brought with it an immediate assumption of heterosexuality. In other words, a White man was always already straight until proven otherwise (Kimmel 2013). With that in mind, a majority of the sequences of focus will largely consider fictional characters of film, television, and other media who are declared straight. The characters can be safely assumed to be straight due to their depicted romantic relationships with women. This dissertation project will also give specific attention to public figures contributing to the trope such as Tom Hanks, Michel

Gondry, and Spike Jonze. Although it is certainly possible these men have had homoerotic relationships in the span of their private adult lives, these public figures can be assumed to be straight for the purposes of this project due to mainstream media’s record of their past and present romantic relationships with women.

Gender studies scholar and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick states in the opening of her “Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure In Your

Masculinity!”: “And when something is about masculinity, it is not always ‘about men’”

(1995, 11). Although this dissertation will predominantly focus on cis men; i.e., men who identify with the gender assigned to them biologically at birth, I wish to make it clear that, just like masculinity, manhood itself is also largely a social construct. I would argue it is vital to examine the ideological forces at work when audiences assume these movers to be performing within their expected (and at times unstable) gender roles. The examination of ideological forces might allow slippages to emerge that can also occur within this complex gender performativity of masculinity. This dissertation consciously

12 focuses on cis men in order to uncover what performance expectations of themselves and from others within American popular culture are required of men identifying biologically with the gender assigned to them at birth. Perhaps within the next fifty years, with the rise of performers and popular cultural including the hybridization of masculine performance such as drag kings, female masculinity, and transgender identity, we might see a new evolution of the White Man Dance trope to include a multiplicity of masculinities as they intersect with popular dance performance.

It could also easily be argued that the phenomenon that White men can’t dance has become so ingrained in the American imaginary it would be nearly impossible to locate all the instances in which it is constructed and thus received by a viewing public via television, film, music video, digital video, social media, blog, internet, and onwards.

To that end, this study certainly cannot give proper attention to all of the places within

American popular culture the White Man Dance trope occurs. For that reason, I will focus with depth on a few sequences and public figures I will argue have particularly furthered the ideological conversation surrounding this trope regarding gender and race.

Since this dissertation project moves between vernacular notions of dance as well as definitions established by historical, mostly , traditions, dance will be defined as movement emerging from a particular movement practice, including stylized movement set to recorded music such as that occurring in lip sync performances and music video. Even though this research is also informed by and theater studies practices, the sequences focused on in the dissertation will be viewed primarily via a dance studies lens. Finally, although the research project must involve a historical

13 exploration of what it means to be White (as well as Black) in American history, the racial distinction of White men will be defined as non-Hispanic, Caucasian men whose racial origins have been assimilated into the larger White demographic in current contemporary American culture.

In order to explore the ways in which dance is performed in American popular culture to reinforce particular ideologies with regards to American masculinity, I intend to primarily focus on dance sequences from American popular cultural media in which the White American male figure dances independently, either in isolation or alongside other figures also dancing independently. I have largely excluded sequences in which the male figure partners a female figure. The rationale behind my organizing principle as described here is that male-female partnering on screen automatically reinforces a heteronormative paradigm, thus affirming the subject’s masculinity regardless of the nature of the dance. Further, the White Man Dance trope as expressed from the 1980s and continuing into present day is most frequently associated with White men who dance freestyle in various impromptu settings.

Finally, this dissertation will explore and hopefully construct one possible genealogy of the White Man Dance in American popular culture from 1980 to 2018 as it intersects with two main ideologies: gender and race. It will quickly become clear oftentimes these categories overlap and shift. However, the dance sequences and figures will be read via the ideology with which they are most prominently associated, or which ideology I argue they most clearly impact. In order to properly situate these choreographies in a theoretical framework, the analyses of the choreographies of focus

14 will be informed mostly by Western theories addressing theater histories, such as vaudeville and minstrelsy; film theory; and gender studies scholarship.

Vaudeville and minstrelsy will provide not only a historical framework for how these comic traditions may inform many of these choreographies, but also a cultural foundation for how these current images of the White dancing male construct Whiteness much in the same way vaudeville and minstrelsy images constructed ethnic stereotypes.

Additionally, the comic traditions emerging from vaudeville and minstrelsy inform many of the choreographies of focus. Film theories exploring the role that movement and montage performs with past and current filmmaking techniques will provide insights regarding how a larger cinematic apparatus incorporates and frames the dance itself. Film theories addressing comic movement provide yet another angle through which to understand the role movement performs in .

Finally, masculinities studies and gender studies offer two distinct but crucial theoretical frameworks through which to understand the ideological positioning of the

White male moving throughout American popular culture. Masculinities studies offers a deeper understanding of values placed upon masculinity in American mainstream culture while gender studies offers an interrogation into how one performs reiterative gender norms. This dissertation presents an intersection of these ideas and then attempts to illustrate how dance can be seen as the moving image reinforcing outdated or complicated modes of gender and racial identity within American popular culture.

Certainly, the research supporting the White Man Dance trope brings along with it varying assumptions and controversies regarding who is allowed to define what

15 American bodies experience. I have presented papers on earlier renditions of the material included in this dissertation at academic conferences and other less formal academic venues over the last two years. Audience members of varying racial, sexual, and gendered identities have taken issue with the complex and controversial material I argue must be addressed in this research project, particularly the charged theater history of minstrelsy, a performing arts history relying upon the denigration and erasure of

Blackness by the very subjects (White men) of focus in this dissertation. Not only that, but the establishment of Eddie Murphy, a Black American male, as the father of the

White Man Dance trope depicting White men as unable to dance, was often seen by these audience members as a racial indictment of 1980s Black stand-up comedy in American popular culture. It should be noted it is not my attempt to blame Eddie Murphy for the evolution of a stereotype of White men, nor is it my attempt to use a theater history which oppressed already marginalized and denigrated bodies of color to celebrate those bodies largely responsible for that oppression. Instead, it is my aim to explore how the complex intersecting histories of especially White and Black men led to the proliferation of a largely singular image of the bad, buffoonish White male dancer.

Man Up: Compulsory Masculinity and the (Straight) White Male Existence

Masculinities studies scholars provide cogent ideas with regards to the ways

White men are expected to perform or prove their masculinity in a shifting American culture over time. In Ramsay Burt’s The Male Dancer, the dance historian attempts to answer a question implied or directly addressed throughout dance studies and popular culture scholarship: “So what then is the trouble with the male dancer?” (1995, 11).

16 Throughout American history, masculinity has been charged with the difficult task of proving a man is “masculine enough” via his relationships to sports, romantic relationships, and differing notions of work, among other social issues. According to masculinities studies scholar Michael Kimmel, the American man transformed into the

“Self-Made Man” he is today due to fears emerging from the late nineteenth century that

“aristocratic wealth saps virility” (2012, 12). One of the ways in which young boys avoided fears of losing virility, Kimmel explains, was to also avoid any activity increasing one’s image as effeminate. One of the most prominent embodied practices boys avoided, which schools removed from boys’ early education, was the act of dancing.

Australian masculinities studies scholar R.W. Connell’s foundational concept of hegemonic masculinity as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (2005, 77) will serve as a central tenet for how men are expected to behave in contemporary mainstream society. Even more to the point is Connell’s assertion that hegemonic masculinity is constructed in relation to women and subordinated masculinities (1987, 61) such as women, Blackness, or homosexuality. Connell’s assertion provides an important point of comparison for many of the sequences of focus in this dissertation, specifically those performances which consciously modes associated with Black or feminine movement. Kimmel offers an updated examination of similar ideas through his exploration of the history of American masculinity and the examples he provides from qualitative studies performed on White men in today’s

17 America. Kimmel furthers Connell’s theories by offering real examples, thus charting the history of American men as they moved away from being labeled effeminate and towards the threat of their entitlement being coopted by minorities and women.

Gender studies scholar Judith Butler offers an important intervention into theories emerging from masculinities studies by questioning the role performance plays in disrupting or reinforcing gender ideals. Butler’s pioneering theory opining that repeated performance of gender patterns constitutes gender rather than innate biology (Fischer

2016) will be crucial in deciphering what possible gender performance is being buffooned in these dance sequences. Butler, who borrows her definition of performativity from J. L. Austen (1975), establishes that performativity is not merely a singular or deliberate act; rather, it is the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names (1993, xi). Butler furthers Austen’s notion to include gender, arguing a misperformance of gender patterns can possibly disrupt gender norms, thus opening up interesting questions regarding the seemingly conscious misperformance of “good” dancing by American White heteromasculinity.

“The Mask Which the Actor Wears Is Apt to Become His Face”: Vaudeville Theater and Minstrelsy as the Blueprint for Racial Ideologies

. . . for we have decided that one man cannot in his life play many parts, any more than he can act both tragedy and comedy, or be rhapsodist and actor at once? Human nature is coined into very small pieces, and as our guardians have their own business already, which is the care of freedom, they will have enough to do without imitating. If they imitate they should imitate, not any meanness or baseness, but the good only; for the mask which the actor wears is apt to become his face. —Plato, The Republic (2017, 27)

18 Rick DesRochers and Henry Jenkins’s various scholarship on the complex theater history of vaudeville will provide a historical and theoretical underpinning for much of this dissertation. DesRochers offers insights regarding how vaudeville influenced many current contemporary such as and . He provides a unique method for comparing the artistic traditions and ethnic performance modes of past and present vaudeville in American popular culture. DesRochers’s scholarship, especially his study The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy: Larry David,

Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, and (2014), will be particularly helpful when exploring sketches emerging from the long-running television show Saturday Night Live

(SNL), consciously constructed as a contemporary vaudevillian variety show (1975-

2018). Jenkins’s efforts to understand the history behind integrating vaudeville techniques in American silent film will provide an important foundation for exploring how comedic techniques are interwoven throughout the movement sequences.

Minstrelsy scholarship will also be vital to the exploration of how the White Man dance trope offers a frequent burlesquing of Whiteness. Both Constance Rourke and Eric

Lott offer important perspectives on the complex histories and aesthetic development of the Blackface minstrel throughout the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Rourke’s text

American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931), one of the earliest scholarly works on minstrelsy’s charged theater history, explores what she argues are the three main tropes defining and establishing American humor: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the Blackface minstrel. These tropes proliferate in interesting (and divisive) ways throughout current contemporary American popular culture, either explicitly or implicitly

19 as a kind of political commentary. I will address these current proliferations throughout the dissertation.

Rourke further expertly discusses the ethical difficulty in addressing the theater history of the Blackface minstrel, a character type arising from the role White men played in further subjugating the plight and position of Black American men. Lott complicates

Rourke’s scholarship when he argues minstrelsy was born out of “love and theft,” a subsequent desire and repulsion of Black men by White men (1995). As many of the dance sequences I analyze involve the White male figure impersonating Blackness or dancing to music created within or shaped by Black American culture (such as Rhythm &

Blues [R&B], soul, or ), the ideas Eric Lott, Constance Rourke, Rick DesRochers, and Henry Jenkins contribute will be crucial in providing differing points of view when analyzing, interpreting, and then discussing these performances in the dissertation.

The Art of the Gag: Physical Comedy as Dancing Engine

Writers such as Lisa Trahair, Dan Kamin, and Noël Carroll will offer useful insights in exploring how physical comedy informs many of the dissertation’s dance sequences, particularly in televisual and film artifacts situated in the comedy genre, such as SNL, Friends, The Office, and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Trahair provides an in-depth philosophical analysis of how physical comedy is incorporated into cinematic narratives, arguing that in contemporary American cinema, physical comedy becomes secondary to the overall of early cinema. Kamin and Carroll respectively provide studies on influential silent film creators/comedians and . As Chaplin and Keaton have profoundly impacted how physical

20 comedy is incorporated into genres such as situational and romantic , these studies will help inform an interpretation of how physical comedy is structurally and aesthetically performed in many of the sequences of focus.

“If There’s One Thing I Could Never Confess It’s That I Can’t Dance a Single Step”: Notes on Positionality and Bias

The beats, yeah, they were coming out the speakers And were winding up straight in your And I’m dancing like every song who spends his bizzle like All my dance heroes would if they existed

And yeah it’s sad that you think that we’re all just scenesters And even if we were it’s not the scene you’re thinking of To take props from nineties boy band All crop tops and testosterone passion

If there’s one thing I could never confess It’s that I can’t dance a single step

It’s you It’s me And there’s dancing —Los Campesinos!, “You! Me! Dancing!” (2007)

Before embarking on the following journey together, I would like to give a sense of the particular positionality of my own dancing body, the very body and framework through which I will inadvertently read these other moving bodies. As D. Soyini Madison explains in Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, “[C]ritical ethnography must further its goals from simply politics to the politics of positionality.

The question becomes ‘How do we begin to discuss our potentiality as ethnographers and as those who represent Others?’” (2011, 7). Given the very divisive nature of the ideological and historical scholarship informing much of the work of this dissertation, I

21 would be remiss if I were not to discuss the biases and lenses through which I will undoubtedly read the White Man Dance trope as both a spectator and a scholar.

If I were to describe the state of being (and mind) I experienced most consistently over the course of my childhood and young life, I would express it with the following phrase: Neither this nor that. I was neither White like my carefree reckless American mother from the hills of Tennessee, nor was I Asian like my rigid, academically refined, immigrant father. I was neither my identical twin sister, nor exactly not her. I could claim neither the gracefulness of a dancer nor the clumsiness of the charmingly awkward.

In my young life, it was my larger-than-life father I watched perform on stage with gusto as I spent most weekends from the ages of eight to eighteen watching my father rehearse and perform Mandarin and contemporary dramas at ’s local outdoor theater or the with his friends. (The only time I did have a small role in one of his theater productions, a silent soldier in a Mandarin version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, I was rushed offstage prior to my exit. No one taught me how not to lock my hyperextended knees if I did not want to pass out; and so, bobbing and weaving, I was dramatically gestured to walk offstage by the crew monitoring me from the wings with disapproving eyes, roles executed by the reluctant wives of my father’s friends too timid to perform themselves.) From childhood through to my teenage years I recall watching my father dance the Pasodoblé at the Chinese Community Center with my soon-to-be stepmother and confidently do the Twist at the Center’s monthly dance parties attended by the adults active in the local Chinese community. Although my father enforced rigidity within the home when it came to discipline and schoolwork, my

22 father embraced a kind of spontaneity and drama when it came to these performances and activities outside of the home.

My dance journey was as inconsistent and polarizing as my previously mentioned biraciality and twinhood. A compressed journey of my dance lineage looks a bit like the following: the requisite three years of ballet, tap, and like most young girls; awkward dancing (while going stag) at school Homecoming dances; extended awkward dancing

(escorted by the class clown) at Senior Prom (our tickets were free because we both had been cast in the school production of The Pajama Game—he as the buffoon, I as the ever-forgettable chorus girl. I was, however, given a part in the production’s sequence when it was clear one of the chorus girls in the sequence could not follow a beat). I continued my dance life by attending weekly adult classes in two years of Jazz and Horton technique until I found myself unable to showboat my face to the audience in

Jazz nor perfect the flat back; one year of aerial dance until I could no longer handle the teacher’s condescension when I needed be told in baby steps how to hang upside down in the fabrics; six months of West African until I was required to perform what we learned that day (solo!) in the dreaded drum circle; several years of weekly nightclub dancing like a banshee, fully sober and all on my own (I must have done something right in my own cultivated dance moves since the transwomen and men who offered me bottles of water told me repeatedly I was a great, brave dancer); and finally, several years of training in intensive classical locally, nationally, and internationally (is it any surprise the dance form I finally excelled at was a most likely to never culminate in a stage performance?). I admit, however, that as a girl,

23 there was nothing I wanted to be more than a ballet dancer—my father often caught me stealthily reading biographies of Maria Tallchief and in my closet while I was supposed to be asleep—but after many years of painful experiences in the studio during which the image of my body moving in my mind as graceful as a figurine twirling in a music box came toe-to-toe with the actual reflection of my imperfect, awkward, insecure form in the mirror, I finally accepted what I truly was: an informed watcher. This lived embodiment as neither this nor that, regarding my identity as both a biracial twin and a mover, helped shape the voice in this research.

Unlike the lovable awkward female characters in film and television with whom I could at times relate and the White men dancers I would eventually sink my teeth into both academically and as a spectator, I was not White. The more I watched the sequences of my focus, particularly those largely contextualized by the Black-White binary relationship, whether in terms of the dance style being mimicked or the song serving as accompaniment for the dance, often couched in a Black musical genre, such as hip hop,

R&B, or soul, the more I questioned the problematic racial ideologies being enacted with the sequence.

Whitewashing, Yellowface, and Asian Stereotypes

According to Mic.com,

[T]he recent controversial casting choices for Doctor Strange, Ghost in the Shell, Aloha, The Great Wall, and Iron Fist—all originally Asian characters played by white —has drawn the ire of Asian and Asian-American celebrities, not least among them Star Trek star George Takei. Now there’s a hashtag that’s working as the rallying cry for the industry’s lack of roles for Asian actors: #WhitewashedOUT. (Surrey 2016)

24 Although it certainly felt assaultive to be a person of Asian descent and Asian- based narratives become Whitewashed on American television and film screens, I had long been disturbed by the depictions of yellowface that for many years seemed to go unnoticed, like ’s Long Duk Dong (1984) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s’s

Mr. Yunioshi (1961). Further, I had long taken issue with how contemporary American comedy, e.g., the liberally conscious (2005-2014), repeatedly used any type of Asian news narrative for comic effect. It seemed the very mention of ,

Chinese, Asian, etc., was immediately primed for laughter by an American audience.

Most recently, numerous critics have addressed concerns of Orientalism in Wes

Anderson’s recently-released stop-motion film Isle of Dogs, which is not only set in

Japan but features White actors, including two who have participated in the

Whitewashing controversy addressed at the beginning of this discussion. As Alison

Willmore states in her critique of the film, “Orientalism Is Alive and Well In American

Cinema”: “It’s Japan purely as aesthetic—and another piece of art that treats the East not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination”

(2018).

However, it was not only depictions (or lack thereof) of Asian representations in

American popular culture I found to be erasures of non-White identity. I also felt similarly regarding twin representations, such as those included in films and television shows like The Social Network (Fincher 2010), The Minority Report (Spielberg 2002),

Pretty Little Liars (2010), and The Parent Trap (Swift 1961). A third way I felt erased occurred in terms of my not-so-unique biraciality. For example, the television show

25 often hints at ’s (performed by ) mixed- race identity with a quick, comically-intended quip most often delivered by the show’s , (performed by ), such as “[Y]our ambiguous ethnic blend perfectly represents the dream of the American melting pot” (2012). It is from this multiplied hybridized identity of being both White and other, both in the particular position I occupy in the melting pot of an American cornucopia and as a moving body, that I will inevitably read the following sequences of focus.

The Scholar as Spectator, the Scholar as Other

Just as the camera offers a very directed point of view, one intentionally manipulating not only what the viewer sees but what that viewer conceptualizes of what he/she sees, I too offer my own biased view based on my unique positionality. Much of the theoretical underpinning informing the sequences of focuses presented in this dissertation must take into account how the sequences offer a form of Whiteface, which would not exist without the denigrative and complex theater histories of minstrelsy and vaudeville. Additionally, many of the sequences contribute to a conversation of the appropriation of Black American culture. I must not deny the denigrative, celebratory, exploitative, and appropriative powers operating within the White Man Dance phenomenon nor can I ignore my own biased viewpoint always already embodied in the reading of these texts. It is my hope a reader joins me in the following undertaking as one viewer of these texts offering one potential way to read the complex cultural, historical, and ideological elements at work in the production and consumption of the White Man

Dance phenomenon.

26 Something for Everyone: The Contextualization and Order of Acts

Following this introduction to the dissertation are the following introductory chapters: “Notes on the Production: The Dance Will Tell You How to Read It” and the

“Prologue: Eddie Murphy, the Reagan Administration, and the Great American Wimp.”

These introductory chapters provide historical and theoretical contexts for the dissertation’s following Acts with a concluding Epilogue:

“Act One, Scene One: ‘Take Me To the Place Where the White Boys Dance’: Hanks’s Manchild and Carell’s Buffoon;” “Act One, Scene Two: Be a Man: Swayze’s Beefcake, Squier’s Fall from Grace, Bing’s Homophobia, and the Lonely Island’s Parody”

“Act Two, Scene One: ‘Pretty Fly For a White Guy’: Hughes’s Modern-Day Minstrel, Ronald Miller’s African Tribal Ritual, and Napoleon Dynamite’s Triumphant Debut” and “Act Two, Scene Two: ‘Just Bumbling Around’: Gondry’s Wallflower, The Justins’ White Negro, and Jonze’s Robots”

“Epilogue: ‘C’mon, Will You Dance My Darling? We’ll Get There Yet’”

In “Notes on the Production: The Dance Will Tell You How to Read It,” I provide my particular methodological strategies informing the bulk of this dissertation. In

“Prologue: Eddie Murphy, the Reagan Administration, and the Great American Wimp,” I contextualize Eddie Murphy’s White Man Dance sketch forming the nucleus of this study via the cultural forces at work during the 1980s in American politics and popular culture.

Acts One and Two offer in-depth readings of sequences focusing on gender and race respectively. Finally, in “Epilogue: ‘C’mon, Will You Dance My Darling? We’ll Get

There Yet,’” I offer possible moments in recent American popular culture providing fissures or exceptions to the White Man Dance trope, which perhaps serve as clues as to where the trope might be headed in the next forty years.

27 CHAPTER II

NOTES ON THE PRODUCTION

THE DANCE WILL TELL YOU HOW TO READ IT

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. —Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (1994, 12)

This chapter offers an explication of the research design and methodological approaches employed in the creation of this dissertation. I begin by briefly illustrating how my idiosyncratic background in methodologies, particularly when viewed through the lens of dance studies research, provided a basis for much of the methodological strategies performed in this work. The chapter continues with a discussion of the significant voices helping to shape the methodological choices particular to this dissertation. Finally, the chapter concludes with an establishment of the parameters and methods of this particular study informed by my background as well as my study of various methodologies discussed in the first two sections of this chapter.

The Poem Will Tell You How to Read It: An Origin Story

As I discussed in this dissertation’s introduction, I am not a traditionally trained dancer. In fact, I would go so far as to say one of the reasons I am drawn to dance is in order to force myself to participate in a discipline that at times feels at odds with my body. Throughout my life I have felt much more comfortable in the role of the watching wallflower. However, I have always had a profound desire to be the ballerina spinning

28 fouettés on the stage before me or the street dancer fragmenting his body in mind- blowing isolations. I learned at some point in my early adulthood that for better or for worse, I should instead embrace my skill at paying attention to detail rather than the formal discipline of dance movement. It was a skill I did not fully appreciate until I attended Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for in .

I attended Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, a low-residency

MFA program in creative writing, from 2002 to 2005. The bulk of the program is completed via correspondence with a different faculty advisor each semester combined with two-week intensive residencies on campus before each semester. During each regular semester the student is required to submit to his/her advisor for the semester the following: new creative work (poems or short stories, depending on chosen genre), revised work, and short analytic craft essays the program calls annotations. In the third semester, the student composes and submits a substantial analytical essay on craft. The final semester is spent assembling a thesis manuscript and preparing an hour-long craft lecture to deliver to students and faculty at the student’s graduating residency.

In my semester-length essay titled “‘The World Is Too Much With Us’:

Landscape and Wholeness in Robert Frost’s ‘Directive’ and Derek Walcott’s ‘Sainte

Lucie,’” I ultimately argued post-Romantic poets Robert Frost and Derek Walcott revise the Romantic lyric established in early to include an exploration of the community’s relationship to landscape where previously poets had focused solely on the individual’s response to nature. In that essay, I employed close reading, a literary studies methodology greatly informing this dissertation.

29 In English and American Studies: Theory and Practice, Martin Middeke gives an overview of close reading as a methodological approach used in literary analysis: “The formalists developed a method they called ‘close reading.’ They studied poems in much detail, with a special focus on stylistic and semantic patterns” (2016, 335). Middeke offers three crucial questions from which to begin a close reading approach: “1. Which topics and issues does the poem raise? 2. How is it written? 3. And why is it written that way?” (335). In Middeke’s explication of close reading in literary analysis, the poem can be seen as the data so that the interpretation of the data emerges from the data itself.

This became particularly true for my analysis of poet Derek Walcott’s

“Sainte Lucie” (Kozain 2011). In this poem, Walcott explores the role colonialism has performed on the landscape. The poem offers a linguistic , incorporating the untranslated fragments of the languages of English, Patois, and French to represent the island landscape’s complicated history as a colonized nation. In contrast, American poet

Robert Frost’s “Directive” (Schmoop Editorial Team 2008) required a different kind of analysis. The poem employed different tonal and metric shifts speaking to the way a landscape erodes over time and in a person’s memory. In other words, what type of close reading I was required to perform was dependent upon the poem itself. Both poems required an intricate study; I took each line as its own micro-text, offering just one part of the analysis of each entire poem.

My previous practice in close reading provided me with an early training of a similar muscle I would need to exercise in the methods performed in this dissertation.

Similar to the methods of this dissertation, which I will illustrate in the following section,

30 close reading requires multiple methodologies, such as textual analysis and historiography, in order to discern what phenomena the poem attempts to explore. The next section will address the particular methodologies of this dissertation and the voices instrumental in informing them.

A Three-Tiered Methodology: Visual Methods Analysis, Choreographic/ Film Analysis, and Historiography

Visual Methods Analysis

Visual methods analysis grew from an evolving interest in the ways in which the visual gradually began to dominate the lives of sight-abled individuals, due in large part to the growing technologies of photography, filmmaking, and other technologically- enhanced abilities to manipulate the creation of images. Because this dissertation is first and foremost a study of dances occurring within audiovisual texts, this dissertation must also contend with its place in the creation and proliferation of particular concerns as expressed in visual media. As Guy Debord argues in The Society of the Spectacle, who provides the epigraph framing this chapter, “[T]he spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (1994, 12).

In other words, this dissertation is primarily interested in how these images offer varied expressions of the White Man Dance trope. Art critic John Berger further attested to the relationship images hold with gender ideologies when he stated the following in his Ways of Seeing: “ . . . men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. . . . The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (1973, 47). Roland Barthes greatly contributed to the semiotic studies regarding

31 the power of the photographic image on the subject being photographed. For example, he aptly addressed the crisis of self and subject implicit in a body who sees him/herself as subject and agent: “In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. . . . I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object . . . I am truly becoming a specter” (1981, 24). Barthes’s depiction of the relationship between self and subject is a crucial intervention into how the repetition of certain images of subjects begins to inform a subject’s own way of viewing himself.

As I mentioned in the introduction, many of the White men to whom I briefly described the premise of the dissertation immediately stated their belief that it was true

White men were unable to dance. In this way one can see how the proliferation of a particular type of moving image in our contemporary American popular culture can result in influencing one’s own impression of the self. On the other hand, art critic Susan

Sontag addressed the act of voyeurism and permanence involved in photography: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. . . .

Photographs furnish evidence” (2011, 4-5). As expressed in the introduction, this dissertation aims to discover what ideological knowledge and, therefore, power, is being imparted in these repeated images of White masculinity, specifically as embodied in dance movement.

32 Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra, to be discussed further in Act One,

Scene Two, is one of the most foundational theories emerging from the new age of image-based technologies. He claimed the twentieth century gave birth to the consequences of endless simulation, which he termed the “simulacra,” a hyperreality

“founded on the image” (1994, 121) and which made it difficult to discern between what was real and not real. African American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. formulates a theory to be addressed more fully throughout Act Two, one merging the oral and the visual in his The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American , where he uses the African American vernacular term “signifyin” in combination with the

Saussurian concept of “signification” to claim “ . . . the literal and the figurative are locked in a Signifyin(g) relation, the and the figurative Signified upon the real and literal . . .” (2014, 26). All of these theories contributed to the field now largely known as visual culture, which “refers to this plethora of ways in which the visual is part of social life” (Rose 2012, 4).

Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual

Materials offers a concise blueprint for working with visual materials, a blueprint I employed to produce each analysis included in this dissertation. Rose argues that in order to develop a methodology for working with visual images, one must first have a framework. Her framework addresses three sites: “ . . . the site of production, which is where an image is made; the site of the image itself, which is its visual content; and the site where the image encounters its spectators or users, or . . . audiencing” (2012, 19).

According to Rose, each of these sites consists of three different aspects or modalities:

33 technological (the apparatus used in making the image), compositional (what, materially, the image is composed of), and/or social (“ . . . the range of economic, social and political relations, institutions and practices that surround an image and through which it is seen and used”) (20). Because visual research can interpret visual images through a number of different philosophical lenses, various methods within these modalities and sites can be used to analyze the visual data. Rose offers a number of analyses as suggestions such as compositional interpretation, psychoanalysis, audience studies, and semiology. What I find most important with regards to visual methods, however, is the way in which the researcher tends to study the varying sites and materiality of the visual images through a particular lens based on the specific phenomena the researcher is interested in exploring via visual materials. Additionally, in terms of this dissertation, it is important to note that because popular culture is always already intertextual, the analysis of each audiovisual text can require the interpretation of multiple sites within the site of focus. In this way, this dissertation’s particular employment of visual methods also incorporates elements of textual analysis, which is adeptly defined by C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges as “a cultural studies method that differs significantly from other social scientific and historical methods. The primary focus of textual analysis is to convincingly trace narratives across different kinds of cultural and historical ‘texts’” (2015, 49).

The data involved in visual methods is constituted of visual materials: images, films, videos, etc. In terms of data collection, the ephemeral nature of mediated technologies can challenge the data collection process. Additionally, the gradual erosion of still photographs or film reels can also affect the quality of the data itself. There now

34 exist services in which one can convert most videos from YouTube into downloadable files. However, if a video is removed from YouTube by the poster or YouTube itself

(e.g., for copyright infringement) before a researcher saves it, it will be a challenge to retrieve it. Additionally, due to the nature of the Internet, it may be difficult to source all the original creators of images used within media. It has also become quite easy for creators to use aliases in creating media so it may be difficult to identify the source.

As stated above, analysis of data involves interpreting the images collected from a particular point of view. The interpretation may require extra contextualization with regards to such aspects as the genre, history, and social relations from which the images emerged. Because the technological apparatuses used in making the images greatly impacts the reception of the image, analyses of the making of the image become just as important as the interpretation of the image itself. For this reason, I focused dominantly on audiovisual texts published in traditional channels and with substantial producers rather than virally created films with indiscernible creators.

Significant ethical concerns remain when employing visual methods as a methodology. Because of the rapid evolution of technology, the inability to source the references used within any visual material inevitably may lead the researcher to assume connections that may or may not have been aspects of the creator’s intention. It is often difficult to find the creator of images, particularly for those found on the Internet, and thus a researcher may not be able to discern the intentions of the creator in making the images themselves. This also brings up yet another ethical issue when working with visual materials concerning copyright and the access to use images in a particular

35 research project. Many users can easily copy an image themselves and re-post it, the creator often clueless as to its new use. The ethical issues of and ownership of found images become important when crediting the sources of the data.

Certainly, however, one of the key ethical issues in this methodology is in the researcher- based perspective emerging from the data. This type of research becomes solely framed within the researcher’s particular viewpoint and bias. The analysis emerging from this data is always explicitly burdened by the particular social, cultural, and political bias of the researcher whose eye interprets the data. Finally, perhaps the most complex concern emerging from visual analyses is the ocularcentric aspect of the methodology itself. This method inevitably privileges the sight as central and requires one to be sight-abled in order to process and interpret the images as intended.

Choreographic and Film Analysis

The major tenet of both choreographic and film analysis share a similar intention.

As stated by choreographic analysis scholar Janet Adshead-Lansdale,

[I]nterpretation, as understood here, is not an attempt to establish a one-to-one correspondence between movement and meanings (in the strictest sense). I regard it as an imaginative and intellectual process that associates movement with events and people both within the movement/dance system and within wider artistic practices and cultural issues. Interpretation is located in a conceptual framework more akin to aspects of post-structuralist theory than to traditional epistemology. The diversity of this rich and complex field offers a treasure chest of explanations, and allows for interventions from the maker (choreographer), the performer and the audience, in coming to grips with dance. (2009, xiii)

For Adshead-Lansdale, the question of the essence of interpretation of choreographic data is not merely one of semiotics and movement but also of the relationship between artistic practices and cultural issues. Similarly, film semiotician Christian Metz argues, “[A]s an

36 anthropological fact, the cinema has a certain configuration, certain fixed structures and figures, which deserve to be studied directly” (1990, 3). Metz also addresses movement as an aspect central to film analysis: “[I]t is movement (one of the greatest differences, doubtless the greatest, between still photography and the movies) that produces the strong impression of reality” (1990, 7). Many of Gillian Rose’s tenets regarding visual methodology apply here, but what is more specific in the case of choreographic/film analysis is the data being addressed. Since this dissertation aims to analyze select in moving images such as film, television, and video, I am most interested in the choreographic practice as it particularly occurs on cinematic or digital screens.

Even more specifically, dance studies scholar Susan Leigh Foster offers a method for choreographic analysis in Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary

American Dance. Foster offers a way of analyzing dance data through the following conventions:

(1) the dance’s frame—how it separates itself from the rest of the world; (2) its modes of representation—how through resemblance, , replication, or reflection the dance refers to the world; (3) its style—how it creates a personal for itself; (4) its vocabulary—the individual movements of which dance is composed; and (5) its syntax—the principles governing the selection and combination of movements. (1985, xviii)

Foster presents a method for how one executes a close reading of a choreographic work.

It is through these conventions a researcher can analyze the data, both in studying the data and constructing its interpretation. Throughout her text, Foster uses language and as analogies for how one “reads” a dance:

Literacy in dance begins with seeing, hearing, and feeling how the body moves. The reader of dances must learn to see and feel rhythm in movement, to comprehend the three-dimensionality of the body, to sense its anatomical

37 capabilities and its relation to gravity, to identify the gestures and shapes made by the body, and even to reidentify them . . . (1985, 58)

Both Adshead-Lansdale and Foster (with a nod at Christian Metz) offer the breadth and depth necessary for reading and interpreting choreographic data.

For both choreographic and film analysis, the interpretation as one of many possible viewpoints emerges from the data (the dance sequence) itself. Also inherent in both methods is the role the camera performs in directing the viewer’s eye, specifically as a manipulative tool unavailable to stage choreographers. Additionally, both methods address the ways in which the viewer’s role in framing the interpretation is paramount.

Finally, regarding the film product, explicit or implicit (such as with a music video) narrative/character, the cinematic apparatus, and the semiotics coded within the product are particular aspects to address in one’s interpretation of data. Within that film product one should also address in his/her interpretation of data the structure of the choreographic text and the bodies used in that choreographic text.

As stated earlier, visual data of this kind ultimately requires a mixed methodology as a researcher is required to interpret a data within a data. The choreographic text, i.e., the data involved in choreographic analysis, is interpreted within a filmic framework.

One cannot analyze a choreographic text within a film without also addressing such elements as genre, body, choreographer, history, style, audience, meaning, and structure of the choreographic text. However, one cannot analyze a choreographic text within a film without also addressing the particular way in which a film director uses the choreographic text within a film with regards to camera apparatus, narrative/character, , cultural context, director, audience, meaning, or .

38 One of the most important questions to emerge from this particular method involves the way the choreographic text is integrated within the cinematic framework for a particular target audience. For this dissertation project, I am interested in artifacts integrating the choreographic text as a kind of happenstance revealing an aspect of the character (or imposed ideology) performing the moving text. Contextually speaking, the viewer does not expect most of the performers of my focus to be able to dance well such as with dancers performing in classic Hollywood musical forms or the professional backup dancers hired in music videos. Most often the dance sequences occurring in

Hollywood musicals are considered non-diegetic (taking place outside of the narrative of the film). I am particularly interested in the ways in which the choreographic text is part of the diegetic narrative/discourse of the film. In this case and for the purposes of this dissertation, it is important to question rather than answer the dance’s role in reinforcing certain social codes regarding race and gender.

With regards to ethics involved in this particular type of methodology, many of the same ethics applied to visual methods apply in terms of choreographic/film analysis.

In addition to previously mentioned ethical issues, the issue of ownership of the choreographic text, slightly different from the issue of ownership of the media itself, is of importance. For example, in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Hughes 1986), which will be further discussed in a later chapter, a group of Black backup dancers performs a short dance sequence in which they enter into the frame during a parade scene. The dance phrase concludes with a movement most likely created in the 1930s during the era by The Three Chocolateers (1937). This scene, centering on the young White male

39 teenager Ferris Bueller (performed by Matthew Broderick) dancing the Twist to the

Beatles’ cover (1963) of The Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” (1963), appropriates popular dance choreographies created by Black bodies and staged on a White seemingly non-dance-trained body. Not only are issues of ownership apparent—will the less familiar audience members now believe Broderick, or at the very least the credited choreographer , is the owner of these dance moves?— but also the dance becomes objectified in a way, meant to elevate the White protagonist over the bodies from whom his movements (and the movements of the backup dancers) originated.

Additionally, particularly with popular dance, choreography in popular culture often ends up a montage of earlier codified dance practice along with current pedestrian movement stylized to music. A researcher unfamiliar with codified dance may not be versed in the traditions and terminology of the particular dance practice appropriated, thus erasing from the dance its origins of culture and context.

A similar ethical issue occurs when viewing and analyzing choreographic texts appearing in music videos. For example, when I researched the dancers supporting White male pop star Justin Timberlake in the music video for “Suit & Tie” (Fincher 2013) on various sites such as the Internet Movie Database and the Internet Music Video

Database, I was not able to locate their names. Therefore, there remains a concern of not only who owns the choreographic style the White men rely upon for choreographic content but also who receives credit for performing in these works. A secondary concern is how the White male monetarily profits from this erasure of these moving bodies as well.

40 A final ethical concern in choreographic/film methodology that Adshead-

Lansdale addresses particularly thoughtfully is the application of theory to the choreographic/film product. Adshead-Lansdale makes clear the theory in this method should emerge from the practice itself. However, she also warns that even though “the theory validates the practice,” she acknowledges “problems arising from the ‘wholesale’ borrowing of critical concepts from literature and film, a ‘re-hash’ of theory which . . .

[is] a timely reminder of the dangers of lack of focus on dance in such an approach . . .”

(2009, 3). Just as film directors and viewers may be unaware of the cultural contexts within which a choreographic text is subsumed by a film product, so too are theories from fields as varied as psychoanalysis, gender studies, and linguistics misapplied to a choreographic text or a film without understanding how that theory was originally employed and how it then places the choreographic text in the background of the theory rather than using the theory to illuminate the choreographic data.

This issue of applying theory to choreographic text became of crucial importance when writing this dissertation. When I proceeded to write my analyses of these texts, I found the texts often offered more questions than answers. These questions came alive through my close readings of the movement as contextualized ideologically around issues of race and gender. It was a methodological challenge not to impart my own viewpoint onto my interpretations of the data before me. But I found when I focused on theory as a way of developing the complexities involved with the concrete details of what was happening within the audiovisual text itself, the research was able to propose new ideas and questions rather than rigid conclusions.

41 Postmodern Historiography

The branch of historiography most decidedly informing this dissertation is postmodern historiography. According to Lynn Fendler,

[P]ostmodern historiography designates an array of approaches to historical inquiry that eschew modern historiographical assumptions . . . [including] teleology, coherence, totalizing (or “grand”) narratives, determinism, progress, truth, realism, objectivity, universality, and essentialism. (2010, 666)

According to postmodern historian Keith Jenkins, this particular subgenre of historiography acknowledges history “is first and foremost a literary narrative about the past, a literary composition of the data into a narrative where the historian creates a meaning for the past” (2003, xii). Since this dissertation will present a selective contemporary American popular cultural history in order to examine the ways the White

Man Dance trope reinforces social assumptions about masculinity, Whiteness, Blackness, and dance, it inevitably becomes clear this is a particularly biased perspective created by myself as the researcher. The role of the historian is to make sense of the past by merging pieces of the past together in order to create new discoveries. In so doing, the historian creates a new understanding of the past, often sparking a new vision onto an aspect of the past forgotten about or showing a new way of reading that text which we call history.

Finally and most simply, history is a text, a discourse examining the past in order to create a new understanding about its relationship to the present and possibly to the future.

Similarly with Jenkins and Fendler’s overarching notions regarding postmodern historiography, performance and theatre historiography also are likewise burdened by the errors of human history. According to R.W. Vince in his essay “Theatre History as an

Academic Discipline,” “ . . . by considering the theatre historian as the product of a

42 particular time and place, conditioned by current assumptions and ideologies as well as by personal predilections, we keep before us the human face of history” (1989, 2). In other words, since this dissertation will contain both film and theater histories, one must ever acknowledge not only her own bias as being a product of history, but also that the histories one uncovers in performance are similarly burdened by the “human face of history” regardless of the verifiable archival materials available to the researcher.

Various data can be analyzed in order to create a history. Archival materials such as documents, images, and films can be analyzed in order to construct a history. For this dissertation I rely most dominantly on the varying histories constructed by other scholars.

These histories are not only important because they offer the data analyses necessary in order to understand the cultural and historical contexts from which these film, television, and media artifacts emerge but they also provide multiple points of view for these various time periods. Since my research project focuses on contemporary American popular culture, it is not only the histories of the time periods that are of importance but also the histories of the particular medium and the biographies of the artists (actors, choreographers, filmmakers, etc.) involved in those products. Many of these biographies offer different experiences of working with the films themselves.

Keith Jenkins aptly addresses the ethical issues of creating a historiography. First and foremost, the researcher’s data analysis is just one biased point of view with regards to historiography. Thus, it is important to have a number of differing to study in creating a historiography. But even more importantly, as Jenkins states, “ . . . history is always for someone. That history always has a purpose. That history is always

43 about power” (2003, xiii). Put more simply, it is the power structure determining in a predominant sense which individuals are being talked about and how. Multiple histories concerning multiple bodies of people occur interchangeably and with a fixation on a singular body of people (such as White men) in order to understand a particular phenomenon (gender structures as evidenced in the ways White men are filmed moving throughout three consequential decades), inevitably other bodies of people (e.g., Asian men or women of color) are erased from the conversation. One must always be aware of not only the bias of constructing a history but also the selective inclusion and subsequent exclusion of other bodies that were part of the same historical constructs.

As addressed via Jenkins and others, the very assumptions and ideological leanings of diverse historiographies provide a new way of questioning the historical and cultural contexts assumed to be evident as an overarching truth. Historiography can lend a way of assessing the social and ideological condition of the time through the ways in which others have written that history. Not only that but the social and ideological position of a particular society at a particular time can also be made clear through what voices are privileged; not only within the historical text itself but by the bodies published as writing those histories. For example, as can be seen in minstrelsy scholarship, the historiographies the incredibly divisive nature of such a complex and denigrative theater history in the ambivalence of the historical approach. When a researcher can study the archival and multimedia data of a history next to historical texts presenting varying interpretations of a particular history, the narratives of that history and the bodies

44 implicated in those narratives begin to reveal a great deal about the social and political climate of the time period being interpreted.

Methods and Procedures

Because this dissertation aims to uncover the ideological forces at work in the construction and evolution of the White Man Dance trope, the various dancers moving in this trope and integrated into contemporary American film, television, and video from

1980 to 2018 constitute the data for this dissertation. As discussed in the introduction, I organized this dissertation’s data collection and analysis into two main ideological categories: gender and race. Originally, this dissertation was organized into very different categories: White men who dance well, White men who dance badly (either intentionally or seemingly for comic effect), and White men who appropriate Black dance models.

However, it became clear through the data analysis process that the data was instead revealing questions predominantly around gender and race. In other words, it was through the writing of the text itself the major themes were illuminated for this research project.

As I began to compile a /texts applying to this dissertation’s focus, I quickly realized there was no possible way to discuss every dance I found contributing to the evolution of the trope for the purposes of the dissertation. Therefore, I chose to focus on dances instrumental in furthering the conversation on this trope of White men within the categories of gender and race. I also desired to include a wide range of contributions from across the time period of my focus. Choreographically, I aimed to encompass a broad range of dance or movement styles to include pedestrian movements and physical comedy. To that end, I addressed both dance sequences that could exist as separate texts

45 as well as dancing moments furthering the ideology of a specific character within a larger text. Finally, this dissertation aims to discuss dances from each medium of my focus: film, television, and video. Because this dissertation intends to provide a foundational genealogy for the trope of the White Man Dance I unfortunately could not include the endless array of viral videos posted by fans or imitators of the trope. As I began to develop the dissertation, I therefore focused on texts that could create a dialogue amongst themselves in which each section’s texts could offer unique ideas from and related to one another. At the end of each act, I also endeavored to provide a more contemporaneous example performing a more complex approach to the trope than those constructing the bulk of each section.

Coding the Data

In order to code this data, I relied most heavily on Johnny Saldaña’s “Literary and

Language Methods” in The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Although this study is not composed of individuals interviewed in order to address a particular phenomenon such as that which occurs in a qualitative study, Saldaña suggests useful methods for the coding needs of this dissertation’s purpose. For example, as he states in his of coding, “[M]otif coding may be better applied to narrative, story- based data” (2015, 151). In this type of coding, Saldaña shows how one can code observational data in the left margin while labeling which motif or “element that sometimes appears several times within a narrative work” (2015, 150) in the right margin. In his description of narrative coding, which he explains is useful “for exploring intrapersonal and interpersonal participant experiences and actions to understand the

46 human condition through story” (2015, 154), Saldaña includes an example in which the notations of the data are marked with codes addressing prosaic, poetic, and dramatic elements (2015, 155). At the end of his section on narrative coding, Saldaña offers a list of dramatic elements to help the researcher code in this method. These coding techniques offered multiple ways to read the particular data of this dissertation, which often involved narrative fictional films and television shows.

Each analysis of focus includes a short description of the larger text into which the dance was integrated. If there were excessive narrative elements, I provided a summary of the text of focus in italics before the analysis of the movement. I also described the scene in intricate detail. In the case of a text incorporated into a television show, film, or music video, details would include , dialogue, gestures, facial expressions, , props, etc. Finally, I place considerable attention on recounting the choreographic movements of the dance of focus as well as the choices created by the cinematic apparatus of the camera. Next, I often discussed how the reader might analyze these through differing cultural or gender theories emerging over time.

Further, the choreographic and film analyses were at times also informed by statements made by critics, theorists, the film director, or the choreographer to help unpack differing ways to discuss the ideological work the dance might be performing within the whole of the audiovisual text including the dance. Additionally, if the audiovisual text (or the dance) signified or referenced previous audiovisual or choreographic texts in its construction, the analysis was thus also informed by a discussion of that intertextual relationship.

47 As stated earlier in the introduction, I read the data constituting this dissertation based on my own cultural, gendered, and spectator lens. Because it was not possible to interview the performers, directors, and choreographers who helped build the dances within these audiovisual texts, I must rely upon my own educated eye of observation. I certainly do not wish to offer these analytical readings as the only way to make sense of the meaning being made in these dances and with these texts; however, I hope to open a dialogue for the ways in which dance is manipulated ideologically to further notions of masculinity and race in these works within contemporary American popular culture.

Finally, as a scholar who considers herself first and foremost a , I took particular aims to present this dissertation in a particular informed by academic analyses situated within the disciplines of popular culture and cultural studies.

Academic writing particularly situated in contemporary American popular culture has seen a merging of generic styles first attributed to cultural criticism, popular media, and self-reflective narrative. For example, the rise of such Internet-based media outlets such as The Huffington Post, Consequence of Sound, Pitchfork Media, and The AV Club has produced a new genre of academic writing occupied with popular culture. This more porous academic of writing contains an informality and experimentation mirroring the practices seen and felt in popular culture itself. With these popular cultural writing methods in mind, I wrote this dissertation in a hybridized writing style as a knowledgeable fan and a critic, as a scholar and a researcher. Whenever my appears to take on a guise of informality or blends the personal with the academic, it is an intentional stylistic choice in order to continue in the genre-fusing trend taking place in

48 current popular culture analyses. Writers such as Hilton Als, Judith Butler, J.

Halberstam, E. Patrick Johnson, and Donald Bogle are just a few examples of writers whose employment of hybridized personal-critical-academic rhetoric has influenced the particular writing style of this dissertation. It is my hope this dissertation can offer one informed viewer’s contribution to the conversation already taking place with other critics, fans, and scholars, largely outside of current dance studies scholarship.

49 CHAPTER III

PROLOGUE

EDDIE MURPHY, THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WIMP

Introduction

In The Complexity and Progression of Black Representation in Film and

Television, media studies scholar David L. Moody’s section on Eddie Murphy, homophobia, and the Reagan Administration is provocatively titled “Eddie Murphy: The

New Coon5?” (2016, 48). The subject of Moody’s text provided the basis for how I first began studying the emergence of the White Man Dance trope in the 1980s. Moody’s text addresses the role minstrelsy performed during the popularity of Eddie Murphy as a

Black stand-up comedian in an incredibly complicated cultural moment. Therefore, this dissertation chapter, further shaped by Eric Lott’s scholarship on the Zip Coon in minstrel theater and E. Patrick Johnson’s work on Black queerness, will discuss how homophobia, a major political force during the Reagan administration, particularly enabled Murphy’s popularity among his large swath of White viewers. This prologue chapter will rely heavily on Moody and Lott’s scholarship while also offering readings of the most consumed (and controversial) sketches of Murphy’s career in order to further contextualize the cultural forces at work in the consumption of the White Man

5 For additional information on the history of the coon trope, please see Joseph Boskin’s Sambo: The Rise & Demise of an American Jester (1988) and Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (2001).

50 Dance sketch and the subsequent proliferation of the White Man Dance trope in

American popular culture.

“Love and Theft”: How Vaudeville and Minstrelsy Gifted Us Our Great Entertainment

In order to properly concretize the racial polemics at work in Eddie Murphy’s

White Man Dance sketch, both its construction and consumption, it is vital to first address the ways in which vaudeville and minstrelsy provided the template for ethnic mimicry continuing to proliferate throughout American popular culture texts across all forms, genres, and identities. For the purposes of this prologue and throughout this dissertation, ethnic mimicry will be understood most productively as an outward expression of ethnic identity self-consciously performed by members outside of the ethnic group operating as the subject of the performance. However, particularly in terms of Eddie Murphy, ethnic mimicry will also extend to performances functioning within the complicated lineage of minstrelsy in the performing arts, during which members of a particular ethnic group performed well known mimicries first constructed and performed

(of their own ethnic group) by those outside of the subject’s ethnic group. Put more simply, as witnessed especially in his most recognizable sketches on SNL, Murphy rose to popularity performing an imitation of Blackness well known to have emerged from early imitations of Blackness first constructed and enacted by White minstrel performers past and present.

Post-colonial scholar Homi Bhabha’s text, The Location of Culture: Of Mimicry and Man, provides a useful contextualization of ethnic mimicry as well as its consequence. As Bhabha states: “Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double ; a

51 complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power” (2012, 122). In other words, when a more powerful group mimics a subordinated group, mimicry then also stands in for “the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an imminent threat to both

‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (2012, 122-123). Thus, Bhabha argues mimicry can be one of the most “effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (2012, 122). Therefore, ethnic mimicry is a conscious imitation of ethnic embodiment understood as the outward physical expression of the socialized practice of culture, self-consciously performed from the outside and cast onto the subordinated body in the performance. This relationship between ethnic mimicry and ethnic embodiment slips and concretizes itself as cultural groups attempted to make sense of their own socialized identity within the late-nineteenth century on the vaudeville and minstrel stage.

This performance can further be witnessed on early-twentieth-century American cinematic and televisual screens, such as with Bert Williams in Darktown Jubilee in

1914, in Everybody Sing in 1938, and the television show Amos ‘n’ Andy in

1951. This history of mimicry helped inform Eddie Murphy’s career, including the trope- defining White Man Dance sketch, as well as many sequences discussed and analyzed throughout this dissertation.

There is perhaps no greater representation of the layered complexities involved in the formative identity conflicts emerging from the many differing bodies, specifically those grappling with what exactly it meant to be American, than the performances

52 brought to the vaudeville and minstrel stages in the early theater histories of American popular entertainment, beginning as early as the late nineteenth century. As media scholar

Henry Jenkins aptly observes, “[M]iddle-class anxiety about jokes and laughter displaced legitimate fears about social change onto the aesthetic sphere; it was a submerged discourse about the cultural transformation of American life” (1992, 28). Before the burlesque era provided women with a stage on which to perform their own vaudeville sketches, the vaudeville and minstrelsy stages were largely dominated by men of varying ethnicities such as Jewish, Polish, Irish, and Black, representing the ethnic caricatures universally recognized by male and female audience members. Although much more recent attention has been placed on the evolution (and denigration therein) of the Black minstrel and its reigning influence throughout early and contemporary American performance,6 vaudeville was influential in providing a profoundly formative venue for ethnic humor through the early performances featuring the varying male bodies of

Europe, especially those who had not yet fully assimilated into the Anglo-American male identity. These ethnic-based sketches were meant to simultaneously entertain and subvert social structures. As DesRochers states in his dissertation, “Going On the Offensive:

Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in American Stage Comedy from 1881 to 1932,” this theatrical structure has a history extending back to the Italian masked theater Commedia dell’ and :

6 See Brian Roberts’s Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925 (2017), Harriet Manning’s and the Blackface Mask (2016), and Christopher Smith’s The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (2013).

53 Making nonsense out of authority was the primary function of the vaudeville gag: masters are thwarted by their servants as in the Commedia dell’Arte, and the societal power structure begins to be questioned and distressed. This upending of power structures through gags and physicality found its way onto the vaudeville stage and into silent film comedy of the 1900s and 1910s, as medicine show and burlesque comic performers sought more lucrative popular entertainments to make their living. The notion of upsetting authority from its early twentieth-century stage, finds its architecture in the gag and the sketch. The mockery of institutions, class hierarchies, and the irreverence to these authorities through gags and comic vaudeville sketches threatened the dominance of Anglo- American middle and upper classes by the underclasses represented by recent immigrants and women. (2014, 39)

However formidable vaudeville’s influence on American popular culture, it cannot be denied the most pervasive and profound figure to emerge from the early vaudeville era and to impact American popular entertainment is the Black stage minstrel.

Perhaps due to the unassimilable nature of the Black American body throughout White and Black America’s complex past and present racial history, the Black American minstrel figures prominently as, to quote Constance Rourke’s foundational text American

Humor: A Study of the National Character (originally published in 1931), an “outward expression” (2004, 92), representing the intersecting identities of America. Further, largely due to the ways the Black minstrel body came to bear on the evolving ideas of

Blackness (and in contrast Whiteness) throughout the minstrelsy era and onward through early film and contemporary popular cultural histories, the Black minstrel figure continues to confound and fascinate scholars from varying disciplines. The Black minstrel can no doubt be seen as a scar on America’s racialized skin; however, on the other hand, the Black minstrel has also given America a complicated legacy of art and entertainment as various performers, writers, musicians, and other artists attempt to

54 understand and negotiate this challenging relationship, specifically in the many ways this relationship depicts the unique and complex identity of American culture.

One of the most significant contributions to emerge from late-twentieth century minstrelsy scholarship remains social historian Eric Lott’s Love & Theft: Blackface

Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which inspired this section’s title. First published in 1995, Lott offers a helpful working definition of minstrelsy as well as an important theory regarding the contradictory images placed onto the Black American male body by White minstrels. According to Lott, minstrelsy

. . . was an established nineteenth-century theatrical practice, principally of the urban North, in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profit. . . . While it was organized around the quite explicit “borrowing” of black cultural materials for white dissemination, a borrowing that ultimately depended on the material relations of slavery, the minstrel show obscured these relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural. Although it arose from a white obsession with black (male) bodies which underlies white racial dread to our own day, it ruthlessly disavowed its fleshly investments through ridicule and racist lampoon. (3)

Although Lott clearly addresses the racial denigration that was part and parcel to the formation of the Black minstrel stage type, he more importantly argues the Black minstrel, specifically as performed by White men, enacted “the haunted realm of racial fantasy” (1995, 4).

Martinique-born, Afro-Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White

Masks (2008), originally published in 1952, is one of the earliest scholarly texts to investigate the psychological ramifications of colonialism on the Black subject. Fanon’s text grapples not only with the Black male body as made object by White men and women but also with the resultant repercussions of that subjugation within the Black

55 male psyche. Fanon further explores the White male fear of the Negro as having a

“hallucinating sexual power” (2008, 136); a fear Lott also argues is enacted in White minstrels’ construction of the Black minstrel character. Lott claims White men felt in equal measure eroticized and threatened by the potent attributes of the Black male sexual body. In other words, the minstrel show “ . . . was less the incarnation of an age-old racism than an emergent social semantic figure highly responsive to the emotional demands and troubled fantasies of its audiences” (1995, 6). The dynamic addressed in

Fanon’s text is further developed in Act Two when I address the Black minstrel’s influence on contemporary American culture via dance (for example, Justin Timberlake,

Justin Bieber, and other White male pop stars who appropriate movements emerging from African American street and popular dance forms) as it intersects specifically with

Black music (e.g., hip hop, rap, R&B, and soul).

Lott sketches the varying character types dominating the minstrel theater that continue to hold pervasive influence on contemporary American popular culture. He discusses two main character types within minstrelsy, which would proliferate in further permutations of the minstrel show in radio, film, and television: Jim Crow and Zip

Coon7. Jim Crow was known as the plantation rustic whereas Zip Coon was referred to as the urban dandy. The Jim Crow character was often paired with the Zip Coon character, enhancing the comic response through the parallels and differentials of Rourke’s earlier mentioned “outward expression” of these two character types.

7 David L. Moody borrows this labeling when naming Eddie Murphy “coon” in his text mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

56 Speaking in traditional darky dialect and embodying an air of being happy-go- lucky, Jim Crow was the plantation slave character who often did the dirty work— stealing chickens, trying to get one over on the slave owner, etc.— while being ruled by

Zip Coon, the “effete but potent” (1995, 25) dandy figure who believed himself to be dignified but still spoke in malapropisms and thus could not be taken seriously by the audience either. One observes this pairing brought to life throughout American popular culture from varying comic duets of all races (and later on, genders) such as with

William Abbott and Lou Costello in radio, film, and television productions in the 1940s and early 1950s; Lucy and Ethel in the 1950s television show ; Richard Pryor and in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s films Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil; Michael Scott and in the contemporary

American adaptation of the television show The Office; and Amy Poehler and on SNL in the early 2000s.

As film historian Donald Bogle argues in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, &

Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, the character most often referred to as a coon whose name was no doubt inherited from the Zip Coon of early minstrelsy “ . . . appeared in a series of black films presenting the Negro as amusement object and black buffoon. They lacked the single-mindedness of tom8. . . . Generally, he was a harmless, little screwball creation whose eyes popped, whose hair stood on end

8 Tom is an abbreviated reference to represent the Uncle Tom archetype emerging in America culture during the late nineteenth century after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published in 1852 and which subsequently inspired a multitude of subsequent theater adaptations. For a more in-depth exploration of the trope, one can refer to Bogle’s historic text mentioned above.

57 with the least excitement, and whose antics were pleasant and diverting” (2001, 7). In a later section of this chapter I will further discuss how Eddie Murphy’s work as a comedian in various American popular cultural texts reveals how he began to embody such a denigrative and divisive racialized character type.

“Something to Hide”: AIDS, Reagan, and the Great American Wimp

“The Fight Against AIDS,” the third episode in the documentary miniseries The

Eighties premiering on CNN on March 31, 2016 and produced by Tom Hanks (an iconic figure in 1980s American popular culture to whom we will return in Act One), features a clip from an early 1980s newscast by NBC journalist Harry Reasoner, during which he states the AIDS virus (although not yet named at the time of the broadcast) was responsible for exposing an identity and lifestyle hitherto considered “something to hide,” i.e., homosexuality. The AIDS epidemic was crucial in the construction and propagation of the White Man Dance trope and the rise of Eddie Murphy’s career in that the epidemic was instrumental in catapulting the outwardly homophobic comedian to stardom. The

AIDS epidemic also created a profound phobia in the American public, directly impacting how dance could be employed as a prevalent means to mark American men as either homosexuals (and thus, possibly afflicted with AIDS) or affirm their healthy masculinity. Additionally, former President Ronald Reagan’s delayed and moralistic response to the AIDS crisis was fundamentally crucial in bolstering an ideology elevating hypermasculinity while devaluing homosexuality in the American public. This devaluing was further seen throughout American popular cultural history such as within Eddie

Murphy’s stand-up comedy.

58 Thus, partially due to American society’s response to AIDS, a new form of fragile masculinity arose out of the complex intersection of cultural factors taking place at the time. Because the AIDS epidemic was initially and solely linked to homosexual men, masculinity thus became burdened by a need to be established as strictly heterosexual. In order to separate itself as being concertedly not homosexual, heterosexual masculinity made itself known in very distinct unforgivable qualities. This section of the dissertation’s prologue addresses the cultural complexities swirling throughout the 1980s.

Diving into this multitude of complexities is important in order to fully analyze and then situate the cultural factors giving rise to the ideological themes and constructions embedded in Eddie Murphy’s career, in both stand-up and .

To properly contextualize where Eddie Murphy’s anti-AIDS rhetoric sits within the overall timeline of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, I will offer a concise timeline of the rise of the AIDS epidemic (provided by www.HIV.gov [2016]) as it intersected with

Eddie Murphy’s homophobic content in his stand-up career during the 1980s. In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a study on a rare lung infection occurring in “five young, previously healthy gay men in ” (2016).

The number of cases that reported of “severe immune deficiency among gay men” totals

270, including 121 cases of those who have died. The following year marks the first time

CDC applies the term AIDS to the infection, short for Acquired Immune Deficiency

Syndrome, defining it as “a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell- mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance

59 to that disease.” In the television special Eddie Murphy: Delirious, Murphy opens by saying,

I got some rules when I do my stand up. . . . Straight up, faggots aren’t allowed to look at my ass while I’m on stage. That’s why I keep moving while I’m up here. You don’t know where the faggot section is. . . . I’m afraid of gay people. Petrified. I have nightmares about gay people. Ladies are hip to it, too. Ladies be hanging out with gay people. . . . You know what’s real scary about that? That new AIDS shit. AIDS is scary cause it kills motherfuckers. . . . One night they can be in the club giving them a kiss, and come home with that AIDS on their lips. (1983)

In 1985, Reagan mentions AIDS for the first time in response to questions from reporters, referring to AIDS as his administration’s priority. At this point, AIDS is not only reported to have afflicted gay men but also those with compromised blood transfusions and intravenous drug users. This same year the actor Rock Hudson, widely known for his romantic performances with women on screen, dies of an AIDS-related illness. He is the first known public figure in America to reveal he was diagnosed with AIDS. On April 1,

1987, Reagan gives a speech in Philadelphia urging young people to use sexual abstinence to avoid contracting the AIDS virus. Reagan famously asks, “[A]fter all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?”

(Boyd 1987). In November of that same year, Eddie Murphy releases the stand-up comedy film Eddie Murphy Raw, opening with a monologue during which he revisits his earlier jokes in Eddie Murphy: Delirious: “I did jokes about homosexuals a couple of years ago, and faggots were mad. It’s nothing like having a nation of fags looking for you” (1987). By 1988, the number of known AIDS-related deaths totaled approximately

20,000 (2016). This brief description of the AIDS timeline as provided by www.HIV.gov with brief insertions of where these moments in the rise of the AIDS epidemic in

60 America intersect with moments in Eddie Murphy’s AIDS-related stand-up comedy illustrates how Eddie Murphy explored fears of homophobia emerging as a result of the confusion and fear surrounding who could contract AIDS.

Mass communications scholar Timothy E. Cook and healthcare expert David C.

Colby in their text titled “The Mass-Mediated Epidemic: The Politics of AIDS on the

Nightly Network News,” included in the edited collection AIDS: The Making of a

Chronic Disease, state: “[I]f Vietnam was the first ‘living-room war,’ with images broadcast directly into American homes, then AIDS may well be the first ‘living-room epidemic’” (1992, 84). The writers also include a quote delivered by journalist Dan

Rather transmitted to him via CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen’s report on May

18, 1983. Rather’s statement points to the ways in which the rise of the AIDS epidemic subsequently led to the rise of antigay paranoia. As he eloquently paraphrases, “Barry

Petersen reports that in some places fear of the disease is itself becoming epidemic”

(1992, 85). Due to the mysterious way in which AIDS slowly became defined in

America, first from accounts in the gay male community in the United States and then gradually to afflict the entire world via sexual contact, intravenous drug use, and blood transfusions, the epidemic gave rise to an American hysteria rooted first in the gay male lifestyle.

Performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson addresses the relationship between the sentiment in the 1980s around homosexuality and Eddie Murphy’s homophobic content when he states the following in Appropriating Blackness:

Performance and the Politics of Authenticity:

61 The popularity of comedian Eddie Murphy in the early 1980s was no doubt fueled by the pervasive antigay, profamily sentiment of that era. Thus, Murphy’s audiences were primed not only for the limp-wristed sissies of his films but also for the general homophobia of his stand-up comedy routines, including the irresponsible miseducation about how AIDS is contracted. Only in a society where hatred of the sexual dissident is tolerated and encouraged would such bigotry be commodified and sold as “entertainment.” (2003, 61-62)

Situated within his homophobic rhetoric and the antigay sentiment taking hold of the nation due to the profound fears materializing from the AIDS crisis in the American imaginary, Eddie Murphy’s sketch was directly consumed and spread throughout

American popular culture via this particular cultural moment, especially regarding male homosexuality and masculinity. Therefore, in this dissertation I propose Murphy’s White

Man Dance sketch, although not explicitly dealing with homophobia itself, is nonetheless read through a homophobic lens developed by Eddie Murphy in other sketches and thus further perpetuated attitudes about masculinity and homosexuality. These attitudes proliferated elsewhere in American culture simultaneously due to fears emerging from the AIDS epidemic in the American public.

In Manhood in America: A Cultural History, masculinities studies scholar

Michael Kimmel discusses how American men suffered from the emasculating defeat via the Vietnam War at the end of the 1970s. He concludes it is “as if this masculine country had been suffering from a nationwide bout of impotence. Symbolically, we even returned to Vietnam in our movies, answering John Rambo’s plaintive question about his own return, ‘Do we get to win this time?’” (2012, 211). According to Kimmel, the

“schoolyard bully” (2012, 211) archetype of masculinity asserted itself during the Reagan years. As he explains further: “So instead, we sought out negative models to attack [the

62 schoolyard bully]. The wimp, for example, emerged in the early 1980s. Magazine articles and films had predicted that this new man—warm, sensitive, cuddly, and compassionate—would be the new of the 1980s” (2012, 212). However, Kimmel further contends the new male archetype of the “soft cuddly man” was not accepted in

American popular culture in the 1980s, arguing these “real men” “ hated wimps because they were so obeisant, as devoted as simpering puppies and just about as sexually compelling” (2012, 213).

It is this nexus intersecting these two reigning models—the tried and true “Real

Man” and the newfound “Great American Wimp”—on which I propose Eddie Murphy’s

White Man Dance sketch stands. For better or for worse, Murphy’s mimicry of failed masculinity via the lens of Whiteface gave birth to an embodiment in which White men felt safe—the worse they danced, the harder it would be to convince society they were the

AIDS-afflicted gay pariahs of the time. However, at the same time these same men are noted as also exploring the very real fragility and emasculation brought on by shifts in society as well as the loss of the Vietnam War. From this particular intersection between

1980s American masculinity and the ideologies emerging from the AIDS epidemic in

America, the Murphy sketch, multiplying like a virus, continues to replicate in differing forms and manifestations. In the next section, I give thorough readings of a select few of

Eddie Murphy’s most significant and albeit controversial sketches throughout American popular media to further position the possible ideological forces at work in their constructions and consumptions.

63 Greenface, Blackface, Whiteface: Eddie Murphy as Ethnic Mimic

Gumby Re-Imagined as Old, Cranky, Hollywood Jew

According to Culture Editor Jessica Goldstein on Think Progress, a progressive online news outlet, Eddie Murphy was SNL’s “savior in its early years and, in terms of box office receipts, the biggest star to ever emerge from the cast” (2015). The comedian left behind many beloved yet racially problematic characters in the show’s forty-year lineage. Gumby, re-imagined by Eddie Murphy in the early 1980s as a cigar-smoking, cranky, Hollywood Jewish actor and director remains among the American public’s favorites, ranked in Newsday’s list of top characters from SNL’s entire run (Goldstein

2015). His sketch involving an impersonation of Gumby is one of his earliest performances to employ the theatrical mode of minstrelsy to explore and trade in ethnic stereotypes and mimicry.

Sculptor-filmmaker and grandfather of Art Clokey created the children’s character of Gumby in the early 1950s with the character’s first debut on

NBC’s Howdy Doody in 1955. This debut led to the creation of The Gumby Show, also on

NBC, featuring Gumby accompanied by his sidekick Pokey, an orange pony, and occasionally featuring Gumby and Pokey’s nemeses, the red figures called the

Blockheads.

Clokey claims in the documentary Gumby Dharma he created Gumby in green because he saw the color as racially neutral, a symbol of life, representing ecological growth such as that which occurs in nature, e.g., trees, leaves, planets, etc. (Marchesa

2006). Further, according to media studies scholar Michael Frierson in “Clay Animation

64 and the Early Days of Television: The ‘Gumby’ Series,” included in animation theorist

Maureen Furniss’s edited collection Animation: Art and Industry,

Clokey believes that Gumby is a reflection of the underlying innocence and idealism that have permeated his relatively sheltered life. . . . Moreover, Clokey believes that part of Gumby’s appeal also comes from our collective past: the appeal of clay is universal, the clay itself being “a symbol of the basic nature of life and human beings.” (2009, 173-174)

However, cultural critic John Strausbaugh contradicts Clokey’s contention regarding the racially neutral properties of green skin when he refers to the Irish stereotype in vaudeville as greenface. In Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation,

Strausbaugh quotes cultural historian Lawrence Mintz who states: “‘The Irish characters are drunk, belligerent, and dumb (dumb was the term commonly used in the comedy—it meant stupid or unintelligent, but it also meant culturally naïve, ‘green’ or bewildered,

‘unhip’ as well)’” (2007, 131). What may have seemed unproblematic to Clokey was taken by some outside readers and viewers to be socially tied to earlier American ethnic stereotypes.

The Gumby Show’s content seems to offer another racially insensitive and problematic angle through which to view the original character of Eddie Murphy’s impersonation on SNL. According to the entry on the blog Retro Bizarro’s titled “The

Racist Colored Humanoid: Gumby on Retro Bizarro,” Kirk Jones addresses some of the more racially problematic episodes on The Gumby Show. For example, in his discussion of one particular Thanksgiving episode using the derogatory term for Native Americans,

“injuns,” Jones describes how Gumby was proven to be responsible for Thanksgiving. He further remarks that “Pokey was concerned about getting scalped and had to eat Indian

65 food which made him turn multiple colors, after which he observed, ‘now I know why

Indians say ugh’” (Jones 2011). This is just one example illustrating how The Gumby

Show could have been elsewise associated with the perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes by viewers.

As a result of Eddie Murphy’s frequent impersonations of the claymation character on SNL from 1982 to 1984, Gumby experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 1980s, leading to new episodes featuring the green figure. Not particularly child- friendly, Murphy’s impersonation of the character was a Jewish, cigar-smoking, cranky

Hollywood actor and director who popularized the expression “I’m Gumby, damn it,” while perpetuating several Jewish stereotypes in different ways across the sketches.

Pointedly, Eddie Murphy transformed into this Jewish Gumby character by wearing greenface makeup and a Gumby suit.

When embodying the greenfaced Gumby as a distinctly Jewish character, complete with a stereotypical Jewish accent, Murphy can be seen as perpetuating the offensive stereotype. To support this contention that green skin color could be read as problematic is the following quote by American studies scholar Dietmar

Meinel in Pixar’s America: The Re-Animation of American Myths and Symbols:

The original film poster to promote the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß shows the bigoted portrait of a Jewish figure whose green skin is supposed to highlight the hideous and sinister character the filmmakers attributed to Jewish people. The trope of the green-eyed is also a to describe particularly envious or jealous characters, another racist stereotype attributed to Jewish people at times. (2016, 95)

Further, perhaps as a reference to Gumby’s humanoid, creature-like form, the character also can be interpreted as embodying the Space Jew stereotype proliferating throughout

66 American popular culture, especially in the genre of science . The trope is defined on the website TV Tropes as “an alien, monster, animal, or other nonhuman creature that embodies stereotypical aspects of a real-world racial, ethnic, or religious stereotype”

(Drewski and Itcdr 2018).

Finally, Murphy caricatures Gumby as both controlling and greedy/penny- pinching, embodying both the Jewish mother stereotype and the moneylender stereotype.

In the sketch titled “Gumby: The Gumby Story Film,” which aired on November 5, 1983,

Gumby as performed by Eddie Murphy is the director of a biopic about Gumby, who is performed by Joe Piscopo. In the short sketch, Eddie Murphy’s Gumby constantly yells

“Cut!” as he corrects Piscopo’s mistakes in his re-enactment of Gumby (Saturday Night

Live 1983). Eddie Murphy’s Gumby as a typical, New York accented, Jewish filmmaker from Hollywood is re-imagined through the lens of the Jewish mother stereotype, defined by jewface.us as “nagging, overprotective, manipulative, controlling, smothering . . .”

(2018). Therefore, Eddie Murphy as Gumby the overbearing director micromanaging

Piscopo’s embodiment of a character based on himself (Gumby) emphasizes the controlling nature of the Jewish mother stereotype.

Another SNL sketch titled “Gumby: Broadway Gumby Rose,” which aired on

December 15, 1984, employs what jewface.us refers to as the moneylender/moneychanger stereotype. This stereotype is more commonly known to the

American imaginary as one depicting Jewish people as stingy and greedy. According to jewface.us,

[D]uring the Middle Ages, Christians were not allowed to lend because the Church believed that collecting interest from loaned money was a sin. . . . Since

67 the were able to collect interest from the Christians, many became money lenders and tax collectors. . . . Because of their involvement with money and banking, Jews got the reputation of being greedy and it was said that Jews would do anything for money . . . (2018)

The sketch, a parody of ’s film Broadway Danny Rose, employs stereotypes even before Eddie Murphy’s entrance, featuring bickering old Jewish men Lew Goldman and Irving R. Cohen at Lishman’s Deli (Saturday Night Live 1984). Actors and perform the roles. Billy Crystal is publicly Jewish and Martin Short is often mistaken as Jewish, even though he was actually raised Irish-Catholic (Martin Short

2013).9 The fact that this sketch is constructed based on Jewish stereotypes and performed by men who either publicly identify as Jewish or are often mistaken to be

Jewish further contributes to the problematic nature with which Eddie Murphy’s Gumby sketches rely on Jewish stereotypes. Once Gumby enters the deli, he interrupts the two men and attempts to order a sandwich. However, he faces an obstacle when a waiter accuses Gumby of running out of the deli without paying his tab back in 1958. When

Gumby tries to say the waiter has him confused with someone else, obviously already

9 Please see the CNN interview with Martin Short on his relationship to his Irish-Catholic background, “Martin Short: ‘You become empowered in a weird way by loss’”: http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/10/tv/martin-short-you-become-empowered-in-a-weird- way-by-loss/index.html. Additionally, Martin Short has been heavily influenced by Jewish humor, addressed in Joseph Dorinson’s Kvetching and Shpritzing: Jewish Humor in American Popular Culture (2015), which could be responsible for the American public’s inaccurate assumption of Short’s religious affiliation and ethnic identity. Additionally, various other sources on the Internet address this common assumption, such as the following discussion thread (2009): http://uaddit.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=2057, http://www.shayne- michael.com/links.php?searchFor=Martin%20Short&findBio=full, and http://whojew.bettersearchllc.com/iframe2- ios.php?name3=Martin%20Short&name=Top%20Non- Jew%20Search&full=Martin%20Short.

68 comic given his distinctive appearance, the waiter sarcastically retorts, “No, no, that was some other green Jew.” This altercation, combined with the waiter’s racially insensitive line, perpetuates the stereotype of the Jewish as money hungry and stingy. The fact that

Eddie Murphy’s Gumby is also the same color as the American dollar could perhaps serve as another reason Gumby was reinvented as a Jewish money-obsessed figure, grumpy he has not achieved his financial success, an aspect seen throughout Eddie

Murphy’s Gumby sketches.

Eddie Murphy’s Blackface Slowly Fades to White

Considered the second greatest SNL sketch in ’s “50 Greatest

‘Saturday Night Live’ Sketches of All Time” (Ciabattoni et al 2014), “Buckwheat” featured Murphy’s most recurring character on the show. A parody of the well known character of the same name originally featured in the short comedy film series Our Gang, which MGM produced from 1922 to 1944, Donald Bogle identifies Buckwheat as a coon type or a pickaninny, “a harmless, little screwball creation whose eyes popped, whose hair stood on end with the least excitement, and whose antics were pleasant and diverting” (2001, 7). As Bogle further describes: [With] “a round chocolate moon face and enormous eyes, Buckwheat always came across as a quiet, oddball type, the perfect little dum-dum tag-along” (2001, 23). To witness the immense popularity of Eddie

Murphy’s revival of Buckwheat, one of the most well known minstrel characters in early

American television history, certainly begs the question: Are audiences laughing at Eddie

Murphy’s impersonations or laughing in admiration for his comedic skill? One can

69 extend this question throughout this dissertation, particularly with the images of the

White Man Dance trope performed within a comic vein.

As acknowledged in African American Almanac: 400 Years of Triumph, Courage and Excellence, “[C]omedian Eddie Murphy’s parodies of Buckwheat in the 1980s were enormously popular; Buckwheat’s generally unintelligible speech, blank expression, and untidy hair provided a wealth of material for Murphy’s routine” (2011, 251-52).

Although Murphy’s Buckwheat impersonation was widely popular with audiences of

SNL, the impersonation itself presented a perpetuation of comedy made problematic and popular during Blackface minstrelsy.

Widely viewed through a satiric lens, Eddie Murphy’s SNL recurring sketch titled

“Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood,” a parody of the children’s television show Mister

Rogers’ Neighborhood, represents Murphy’s gradual transition to explore the racial relations between Blackness and Whiteness via an employment of ethnic mimicry. As gender studies scholar Susan Gubar questions in Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in

American Culture,

[W]ho is conned by whom and for what purpose? [Langston] Hughes implies that it is one thing for blacks to impersonate whites, quite another for whites to masquerade as blacks. He feels exploited, his culture invaded and spied upon, his authenticity at risk. And of course he is addressing a taboo still very much with us. Eddie Murphy elicits laughs when he uses the satiric tradition of racechange to impersonate Mr. Rogers in his parodic “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood.” Asking little boy and girl viewers if they know the meaning of two important words in the ‘, he pulls on his , laces his , faces the camera, and earnestly mouths the phrase “Eviction Notice.” Even when Eddie Murphy puts on white make-up, it only signals a kind of antic clownishness . . . however the minstrel in blackface remains a taboo emblem of reactionary white supremacy . . . (2000, 37)

70 Gubar pinpoints the central complexity in ethnic mimicry, the power differential engaged when a White minstrel mimics Black identity versus the opposite performed by Murphy.

Although seen as satirical at the time of its airing, the ghetto-ridden “Mister Robinson’s

Neighborhood” also results in perpetuating Murphy’s more current Black stereotypes. In the sketch titled “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood: Summer,” for example, aired in

1983, Mister Robinson teaches the children how to make money by modeling stolen goods such as car radios, gold chains, and wallets. The sketch ends when the police knock on Mister Robinson’s front door and he makes his get away using the fire escape.

Although the sketch makes an important distinction regarding the White middle-class suburban identity of the source text by addressing the very different reality for many

Black American families and children watching the show, it nonetheless reduces the

Black American identity to a thug life of petty crime (Saturday Night Live 1983).

Finally, through the use of Whiteface makeup, Eddie Murphy transforms into a

White man in the 1984 sketch “White Like Me.10” Structured as a , Eddie

Murphy opens the sketch by stating “[T]here are actually two Americas, one Black and one White. But talk is cheap. I decided to look into the problem myself, firsthand. To go underground, and actually experience America as a White man” (Saturday Night Live

1984) As he walks through a door labeled “Make Up” and proceeds to have beige makeup caked on his face, he continues to explain he “hired the best make up people in the business. If I was going to pass as a White man, everything had to be perfect.” The

10 For a more recent SNL sketch clearly inspired by “White Like Me,” see ’s sketch on the recurring segment “” (aired on December 9, 2017) in which he goes undercover as a White woman.

71 next step in Murphy’s transformation is to study White people on television. He makes a joke that he watched a lot of Dynasty, and as the audience watches Murphy watch a television set whose images it cannot physically witness, he describes out loud how

White people walk with their bottoms held tight. Murphy, briefcase in hand, walks out onto the street in a three-piece suit, rigidly holding his body, his hands straight by his side, his head barely moving. His experience as a White man includes being given a newspaper for free (despite Murphy’s incredulous reaction); watching the all-White passengers on a bus sing, dance, and drink with abandon once the sole Black passenger exits; and being generously offered a loan from the bank’s cash box by a White male loan officer as he guffaws with carefree laughter. The sketch concludes with Murphy walking past a number of Black men and women in their own makeup rooms getting into their

White disguises, warning the audience members one can never be too sure the White man or woman they cozy up to is not in fact Black (Saturday Night Live 1984).

American studies professor Gayle Wald further analyzes Murphy’s “White Like

Me” sketch in her text Crossing the Line, Racial in Twentieth-Century U.S.

Literature and Culture. She states:

Updating and revising Black Like Me (white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 best-selling account of passing for black through the segregated South of the late 1950s), the [Murphy] skit gently spoofs African Americans’ expectations of white entitlement and racial fraternizing . . . “White Like Me” also speaks to the realities that inform such expectations. (2000, 3)

“White Like Me” is a precursor to the figurative Whiteface Eddie Murphy performs in his stand-up specials, including the White Man Dance sketch. Similar to the White Man

Dance sketch, Murphy claims his performance of Whiteness emerges from his intense

72 study and observation of White culture. He uses the observation model to comment on the racial differences between Whiteness and Blackness, both how each racial group behaves as well as how the American public treats each racial group differently due to aspects of cultural privilege and marginalization.

Throughout these comedic sketches, Eddie Murphy certainly problematizes racial complexity in American culture largely informed and constructed through the lens of caricature and ethnic mimicry. However, it could just as clearly be argued Murphy also further reduces the bodies of his focus to mere stereotypes through the art of impersonation. Murphy over-exaggerates stereotyped aspects of Black and Jewish identity and therefore possibly flattens these non-White bodies with outdated first employed by White America in order to mock these bodies.

Because he first and foremost signifies himself as Other, Murphy thus legitimizes for the

American public the stereotype through mockery, impersonation, and humor. The White

Man Dance sketch, first seen by audiences just three years after the airing of the sketch

“White Like Me,” is received and consumed through a frame of reference encompassing

Murphy’s work on SNL where he first rose to immense popularity among a mainstream

American audience. Rather than indict Murphy for the complications among which his racial caricatures sit, I would argue instead that Murphy’s work, including the White Man

Dance Sketch, is born out of a very particular ideological moment occurring throughout the early and mid-1980s, one intersecting the many identities of gender, class, sexuality, and race in American culture.

73 From the history of Eddie Murphy’s pioneering sketch as it connects with the ideology of 1980s American culture, I now move on to Act One, in which I begin to analyze occurrences I read as examples of the White Man Dance trope illuminating the ways in which the trope can be read to represent or subvert gender ideologies.

74 CHAPTER IV

ACT ONE, SCENE ONE

“TAKE ME TO THE PLACE WHERE THE WHITE BOYS DANCE”11: HANKS’S MANCHILD AND CARELL’S BUFFOON

Introduction

In the prologue I discussed the inception of the White Man Can’t Dance trope emerging from Eddie Murphy’s 1987 stand-up film Eddie Murphy Raw. In that discussion, I suggest how American audiences’ consumption of the White Man Can’t

Dance trope was perhaps made ideologically complicated via Eddie Murphy’s prior comedic sketches, first created and performed by Murphy for the vaudeville-inspired variety television show Saturday Night Live. Those sketches, which employ tropes of race, ethnicity, and masculinity, establish Murphy’s comic identity as irrevocably tied to racial and gender impersonation.

Having been born of the 1980s, the White Man Dance then, as explored in depth previously in the prologue, can be viewed as one product of an important cultural moment during the Reagan Administration as the trope intersected with the AIDS epidemic. Thus, as is this dissertation’s intention, a way in which the White Man Dance can be studied is as situated within the intersection of hyperbolic fears of homosexuality and traditional expectations of White masculinity at the time of Eddie Murphy’s iconic trope-defining comedic text. In other words, one tenet of White masculinity emerging

11 “Where the White Boys Dance,” The Killers (2006)

75 from the 1980s hysteria of homosexuality and the rise of the AIDS epidemic in the mainstream media was that White men who danced well were suspected as being homosexual or at the very least to possess an untenable and strained tie to traditional modes of masculine embodiment. For example, as E. Anderson explains in his 21st

Century Jocks: Sporting Men and Contemporary Heterosexuality, homosexuality in the

1980s was “not only pathologized as a lack of masculinity, but it was associated with viral genocide. . . . Gay men were now stigmatized as being both effeminate and diseased” (2014, 47). He contextualizes this argument in terms of the AIDS crisis in particular when he states, “HIV/AIDS had an incalculable and unfortunately rarely acknowledged effect on the gender expression of men, both heterosexual and homosexual” (2014, 151). As Anderson makes clear, one of the cultural impacts of the

AIDS epidemic was how it aligned homosexuality with fear, which could be associated with any type of physical embodiment linked to homosexual behavior, either assumed or actual. Given Eddie Murphy’s trope-defining sketch was borne from the era of this hysteria and hyper-surveillance which emerged from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a can thus be made between the White Man Dance sketch and Murphy’s other companion sketches included in that same special which addressed his own struggles with and fears of homosexuality and AIDS.

Given the cultural complexity of this historical moment which gave rise to this trope, I start Act One and then thread through the rest of the dissertation a demonstration of how Eddie Murphy’s formative sketch provided the foundation for a trope helping to contribute to the ideological assumptions about White dancing men in differing ways and

76 from differing perspectives. To do this, I provide differing choreographic and film analyses of significant examples in two main ideological underpinnings: gender and race.

Act One will focus on gender and Act Two will focus on race. These acts are subdivided into Scene One and Scene Two. I close each act with the analysis of a more contemporary example I interpret as a kind of subversion or disruption of the trope as it develops with regards to gender or race.

In Act One, I offer close theoretically informed readings from American popular cultural texts concerning select movement-based sequences featuring Tom Hanks, Steve

Carell, Billy Squier, and Matthew Perry. I close with a discussion of the comedic trio the

Lonely Island. Each reading in Act One offers a discussion of what these dances signify with regards to gendered ideology in terms of the overall development of the White Men

Can’t Dance trope, and what the images of these men or the texts in which these images are positioned communicate regarding the ideological positioning and questioning of

White masculinity, particularly as it intersects with movement.

In the following pages, I discuss how the White dancing men of the 1980s and the

1990s in American popular culture could be viewed through two different gendered lenses: that of the likable such as Tom Hanks and Steve Carell; and that of the effete buffoon such as the rock musician Billy Squier and Matthew Perry’s Chandler

Bing character on the television show Friends. As I demonstrate in my analyses of these figures, both of these character types are depicted within a liminal frame of gender performance. Further discussed later in this section, liminality occurs when a figure is in a transition from one stage of identity to another. The men in Scene One and Scene Two

77 struggle with different types of masculine identity. But overall, in my contention, the images of the men in Act One appear to be largely depicted in relationship to their affirmation (or tenuous hold) on masculinity within a heteronormative framework, and the dance serves to illustrate that uncertainty through this framework.

When Two Became One: How the Twist Freed the Couple

Because this dissertation dominantly focuses on White men who dance individually (rather than in a more traditional male-female partnering), I find it important to begin by traveling back in time to the moment largely agreed upon by dance scholars as the beginning of freestyle dancing, i.e., the youth dance fad in the early 1960s known as the Twist. Another reason the Twist is particularly relevant moving forward in this dissertation is that, as Tim Wall argues in his essay “Rocking Around the Clock:

Teenager Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965,” published in Julie Malnig’s edited collection titled Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, “the dance moves of black youth were to become the most significant influence on white teenage dance” (2009, 187). The cross-racial employment in popular cultural dance will be discussed at length in Act Two of this dissertation.

As defined succinctly by Wall in the previously mentioned essay, “[T]he Twist was a noncontact couples’ dance, popularized on Philadelphia-based and nationally syndicated ’s American Bandstand, and danced at this point to Chubby

Checker’s recording of the same name” (2009, 188). American Bandstand, which influenced other similar music-based television programs such as and Top of the Pops, was an incredibly important televisual text for American dance trends,

78 particularly regarding the biracial transfer of dance forms to a young White audience, both on the set of the show as well as in living rooms across America: “The teen dance show became a key means for artists and dances from African American culture to cross over to white dance culture” (2009, 190)12. As I will discuss in later chapters of this dissertation, American Bandstand, which aired on network television from 1952 until

1989, also crossed over into the early evolution of the White Man Dance trope. It also seems revealing the show was cancelled in the late 1980s just as this trope gained momentum in American culture.

American Bandstand established what Wall refers to as “a powerful means of transmitting dance moves” (2009, 190) from Black dancers to a larger White audience, what Wall refers to simply as copying. Interestingly enough, American Bandstand began to decline just as a trope featuring White men purposefully performing bad dance began to rise in popularity in American popular culture, a style of dance based on a certain kind of athletic play rather than on replicating a traditional of what dance “should” look like.

The Twist, a dance fad American Bandstand helped popularize, is known throughout the academic dance community as the form which helped

12 Please see John Jackson’s book-length study, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Empire (1999), for a more thorough discussion of the show’s importance. Additionally, Julie Malnig’s essay on Dance Heritage’s website addresses how the rising popularity of Soul Train and MTV attributed to American Bandstand’s decline: http://www.danceheritage.org/treasures/amerbandstand_essay_malnig.pdf. Finally, Jennifer Smith offers a useful exploration of the hidden homosexuality of the dancers on American Bandstand in her 2017 article titled “American Bandstand kept secret that teenage stars were gay despite many of the young dancers sleeping together”: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4306112/American-Bandstand-kept-secret- teenage-stars-gay.html.

79 eradicate couple dancing in American social dance, breaking from the etiquette-based social dance forms preceding it. Wall establishes this important argument in the following passage where he describes both the dance movement itself and its consequent result in focusing on the individual:

The Twist is more obviously a partner dance without real steps. As the name suggests, its basic form is focused on a twisting of the body created by swinging the knees in parallel in one direction around the pivot of the ball of the foot, while swinging the upper body through the arms in counter direction. It is performed with a strong sense of to a mainly up-tempo, syncopated beat. The dancers often execute shifts of balance that undermine the symmetry of the Twist in three main figure categories: lowering the body gradually through the bending of the knees; transferring weight to one leg, and then the other, often accompanied by the raising of the unweighted leg from the knee; and incorporating elements of other dances such as steps, partner turns, or upper body moves.

In the historical development of social dance, the Twist seems to be a move toward individualistic dancing of the later 1960s and the first move from couple- based dances. This is largely because the coupling of the dancers is based on an orientation, rather than physical contact or holding. The moves of individual dancers are performed with reference to other couples, however, either in mirrored solidarity or dexterous competition. . . . The dance fads of the 1950s and 1960s did herald a greater emphasis on the individual that was to come to fruition later in the 1960s and 1970s. (2009, 195-196)

The Twist, as established by Wall’s explication excerpted in the previous paragraph, sets up a more contemporary stage and cross-racial dynamic. It establishes one of the earliest significant dance fads to split the couple in American social dance, thus offering an opportunity for the White male to dance on his own, requiring an element other than a female partner to affirm his masculinity. For seemingly the first time in

American social and vernacular dance, the Twist freed the male (and female) from the structure of leading and following, enabling each dancer to become his/her own spontaneous innovator. The male dancer could lose himself in the play of the dance

80 because he no longer had to occupy his attention with the intricacy of learned dance steps within the structure of the embrace. As a result, physical comedy and other artistic responses to movement could now be integrated into individual dancing. Tangentially, this split of the couple also freed the female from requiring a lead in order to dance in social and informal dance settings. Finally, the Twist intersects with the trend as young

White movers began to borrow, or as Wall states, outright copy, African and African

American dance forms in order to grandstand new dance trends in a communal setting.

This historical moment of the Twist contextualized by its popularization in

American Bandstand is important to this dissertation’s premise in that it acts as a foundation for the White Man Dance trope for several reasons. First of all, the Twist establishes one of the most significant popular American dance trends to reach a large

White audience via American Bandstand, explicitly one successfully separating the dancing couple. The Twist gave rise to White men dancing alone, specifically later in the disco-era of the 1970s and then in the White Man Dance trope-defining era of the 1980s.

Further, the Twist epitomizes a cross-racial appropriation of Black dance forms by White bodies via American popular culture. This becomes particularly important in Act Two, where I discuss an offshoot of the White Man Dance trope in which White men employ

Black-dancing models in their movement as a sincere replication or as a parody of themselves trying to replicate the form13. Finally, the Twist’s simplicity of movement offered Americans a dance fad in which the dancer did not need to have an established

13 It should be noted, however, the notion of imitating popular forms was happening throughout many art forms at the time as shifts in technological development began to occur such as in modern art, performance art, popular music, etc.

81 dance background or expertise in physical coordination in order to execute the dance. The

Twist, as well as other similar dance fads the Twist inspired, contributed to an eventual rise in spontaneous, happenstance, and freestyle dance movement within American popular culture.

To close, the Twist (and other dance forms of its time) enabled a more athletic style of dancing having more to do with creativity than with technique because the dances and dancers were freed from the reliance upon choreographed partnering. This solo style of dancing brought about a completely new way of embodying dance movement, and therefore, dancing began to shift into a kind of creative athleticism. It is for these reasons

I include this brief discussion to help contextualize what is happening in American dance and American popular culture before offering the first choreographic and film analyses to focus on White men who embody the White everyman archetype, Tom Hanks and Steve

Carell.

A Most Trusted American, a Most Likable Hollywood Star: Tom Hanks

My research has led me to argue that the White Men Can’t Dance trope—the trope that White men are unable to dance well—is consciously in dialogue with the very movers who affirmed their masculinity in differing ways through the lens of dance. As will be illustrated in the following movement analyses of Act One to include Tom Hanks,

Steve Carell, Billy Squier, Matthew Perry, and the Lonely Island, it is their display of hegemonic masculinity, as defined in this dissertation’s introduction, enabling their

82 dancing to be consumed14 by a mainstream audience15. However, in many of these sequences I observed gender norms are troubled or questioned at the same time as traditional norms of masculinity are being represented.

On May 20, 2017, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson opens his monologue as weekly host of SNL by discussing rumors he will run for President of the United States in 2020.

Standing onstage next to actor , who recently received an Emmy for his recurring controversial impersonation of President Donald Trump for SNL, Johnson announces to erupting applause he’s “all in.” He continues his announcement, stating he has already selected his running mate, one who possesses the following qualities: “He’s already very well liked, and like me, he’s charming, universally adored by pretty much every human alive.” As Baldwin grins and nods, implying that Johnson refers to Baldwin himself, Johnson instead introduces Tom Hanks as his running mate (Saturday Night

Live 2017).

Johnson’s announcement of his campaign, later admitted to be a joke, was covered by many major news outlets in America such as CNN, , USA

Today, and Business Insider, to name only a few. Although situated in comedy,

Johnson’s monologue introducing Hanks alludes to a common impression that Tom

14 I use the word “consume” as a verb to denote the cultural currency derived by the continued and continual viewing and processing of a textual artifact by a viewer, such as a film, television episode, or digital video. 15 For a more thorough discussion of the difference between mainstream, indie, and niche audiences, particularly in film, please see Carrie Szabo’s thesis, “Independent, Mainstream and In Between: How and Why Indie Films Have Become Their Own Genre” (2010): http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1101&context=honorscolleg e_theses.

83 Hanks has gradually imparted on the American viewing public: He was portrayed as the most likable man in Hollywood and perhaps America. This 2017 claim of Hanks’s trustworthiness was substantiated by an earlier 2013 Reader’s Digest article titled “What

Is Trust: The 100 Most Trusted People in America.” In this text, the data from a poll conducted in collaboration with Wagner Research concerning what individual the public considered most trustworthy in America was compiled. The poll revealed Tom Hanks was considered to be one of the most trusted men in America at that time (Smith 2013).

For the purposes of this dissertation, I analyze how Hanks’s on- and off-screen public images may have contributed to this feeling of trustworthiness by the general

American public, and how these images helped form the public’s shifting images of acceptable masculinity. To that end, I posit Hanks was considered to represent the

“everyman American.” In the following section, largely informed by scholarship from masculinities studies scholar Fred Pfiel, close readings are offered to demonstrate how

Tom Hanks’s dance sequences helped contribute to a new image of masculinity within

American popular culture.

Tom Hanks as Soft-Bodied, Disarming Nice Guy

In order to aptly situate Hanks’s image as a mover over the last forty years in varying mediums to include film, television, and video, the first order of business is to contextualize Hanks’s growing popularity in the 1990s as an example of an acceptable model of masculinity widely consumed by mainstream audiences of American popular culture. As masculinities studies scholar Fred Pfeil argues in his essay “Getting Up There

With Tom: The Politics of American ‘Nice,’” published in a gender studies reader edited

84 by Judith Kegan Gardiner titled Masculinity Studies & Feminist Theory: New Directions, masculinities studies has dedicated much critical consideration towards “the outwardly hard-bodied, inwardly anguished, rampaging male as incarnated in the star image of

Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, , and/or Sylvester Stallone” (2002,

119). However, as Pfeil contends in his central argument, “a quite different version of masculinity has, in the form of the emphatically soft-bodied Tom Hanks, been taking up more and more room on the cultural landscape” (2002, 120). Pfeil’s following central question opens possible insights into how Tom Hanks as the everyman might be read:

And what, finally and not at all simply, are the implications of the construction and promotion of this particular [Hanks] rendition of white masculinity as the increasingly hegemonic alternative and/or complementary version to that of the rampaging “angry white male” victim, for those of us who still care and dare to dream of a world in which both the insidiously covert and brutally explicit coercions and exclusions of race, gender, and class might reasonably be regarded as nightmares of the past? (2002, 120)

With Pfeil’s question in mind, this section seeks to explore what Tom Hanks and his particular brand of “trusting” White masculinity ultimately offers the White Man Dance trope.

Tom Hanks initially grew to popularity when he was cast as Kip Wilson in the short-lived television series Bosom Buddies, which aired on ABC from 1980 to

1982. Kip and his buddy Henry both work as executives in and disguise themselves as women in order to obtain residence at the Susan B. Anthony

Hotel. The introduction to Tom Hanks via this televisual text is important in establishing the White male as an unintimidating antithesis of the hulking male stereotypes of the

1970s such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not only does the show

85 employ cross-dressing as a dominant throughout its run, but it also introduces male stars learning a great deal about presenting and being read while also ultimately finding discomfort at disguising themselves as women. Further, both main characters are posed as middle-management professionals constantly seeking both friendship and romantic relationships with women; depending on what role they perform in the show at the time.16

Further, as Pfeil argues, the comic engine employed in the cross-dressing performed on

Bosom Buddies

. . . is played out in a slapsticky way that suggests quite the opposite of any actual incorporation of conventionally feminine psychological attributes, as in the case of our simultaneously feminized and hypermasculinized rampagers; the laughs are merely about how utterly unconvincing and uncomfortable the two guys are in wigs and women’s clothes. (2002, 121)

One might reasonably argue Kip and Henry exert their White male privilege in order to take residence from the women who actually deserve it; however, at the same time, they are never quite comfortable in the role they have opted to play.

Although short-lived, Bosom Buddies addressed the shifting positions of men during this time in America with regards to gender relations. For example, because men were no longer the sole providers in the household, men were suddenly in a position where they were pressed to contend with this liminal position of being both equals and romantic partners with women. Men in America were no longer able to feel secure in

16 It could be argued Bosom Buddies emerged from second-wave feminism during the late 1960s and 1970s. Largely provoked by Betty Friedan’s 1963 text The Feminine Mystique, second-wave feminism was concerned with issues such as equal pay for women in the workplace, reproductive rights, sexuality, and custody and divorce rights. In terms of Bosom Buddies, White men are no longer the only bodies with rights as Kip and Henry must disguise themselves in order to gain residence in a hotel reserved for women. Additionally, their superior is also a woman, further promoting the new gender negotiations of the early 1980s White American male.

86 their position as the domineering providing lover; instead, they had to negotiate this liminal space of being both friend and lover simultaneously. Although the characters in

Bosom Buddies are interested in being convincing as women, the men “misperform” the disguise for comic effect, their clumsy performance thus preventing the actors from being seen as homoerotic or as transgender. However, at the heart of this show and Hanks’s embodiment of feminine identity lies an attempt to depict men struggling to navigate all of these new gender shifts indeed happening in America during the 1980s and early

1990s. Starting with Hanks’s early role in this television show, an audience member can quite literally track an evolution of gender roles in American society and in particular,

American men’s liminal space within traditional modes of masculinity, through Tom

Hanks’s expansive forty-year career. This early stage of liminality,17 represented in

Hanks as a not fully formed traditional masculine man, continues to shape Hanks’s next performance in the film featuring his popular and oft-revisited dance, Big.

Tom Hanks as the Favorite Manchild

Josh Baskin is thirteen years old. After making an impulsive wish on an arcade

game the night before to be big, mostly so he could be tall enough to ride the

same carnival ride as his high school crush, he wakes up a man in his thirties. At

a loss, “big” Josh corners his best friend Billy in the equipment room in the

school gym hoping to convince him that the man Billy sees before him is indeed

17 First coined by folklorist Arnold van Gennep in the twentieth century, the term “liminality” originally signified a transitional stage in a participant’s rite of passage but is now more popularly used to describe an individual’s ambiguous state in the process of transformation. A more in-depth discussion of the term can be found in Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, first published in 1966 (1996).

87 his best friend and next-door neighbor. But how? Billy has backed away from

Josh and now they are in a stand off of sorts—Josh near the door and Billy

against the wall. Desperate, Josh begins to perform the rap-dance only the two of

them know. And slowly, bit by bit, what Josh begins to perform in individual

desperation the two of them ultimately perform together, as the boys gradually

lessen the space (and lack of trust) between them18.

Over the past few years, many American privately and publicly recorded moments of Tom Hanks dancing have reached viral status—such as when Justin Bieber shared a short iPhone video of Tom Hanks dressed as a rabbi dancing to Montell Jordan’s

1990s R&B hit “This is How We Do It” (Bieber 2014); when Hanks’s own son Chet posted a YouTube video requesting his father perform the , a originating from ’s hip hop scene (Hanks 2015); or perhaps the most bizarre occurrence, when TMZ shared Hanks’s appearance on a Spanish Univision show, during which

Hanks dances goofily next to a weather woman, clearly unable to speak or understand the

Spanish-speaking hosts (Univision 2011). Further, in response to Ellen Degeneres’s interview question on The Ellen Show regarding his apparent enjoyment of dance in various occasions on- and off-camera, Hanks offers the following disclaimer:

“Understand, understand. I have a recessive dance gene, quite frankly because of my complexion. I like to say I’m a White boy from Oakland. But I am from Oakland, you see, so, we can, I believe you know what we can do” (The Ellen Show 2011). This quote

18 Throughout this dissertation, I periodically include italicized summaries of the overall narrative of the audiovisual text of focus to give the reader a sense of the scene of the film, video, or television episode within which the dance is featured or included.

88 acknowledges the impression that White men are not expected to be able to dance (thus, his “recessive gene”) while also inserting Hanks within a regional (“I am from Oakland”) context of Black urban identity. In other words, he asserts himself within two polar associations with race and dance, that of White masculinity and dance and that of

Blackness and dance. I would argue Hanks thus places himself in yet another liminal space, that of gendered and cultural expectations of dance. This space is made evident when analyzing his first virally beloved dance, the rap-dance in the 1988 film Big.

Before conducting an analysis of Big, I would like to bring the reader’s attention to the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, where Paul the Apostle warns his readers via a phrase often associated with dance:

“When I was a little child, I talked and felt and thought like a little child. Now that I am a man I have finished with childish things” (Phillips 1996). This biblical sentiment underscoring much of American culture enables an interesting reading of how an audience might relate to Hanks’s performance in Big: Tom Hanks portrayed a dancing boy-in-a-man’s body, placing his character in yet another liminal space between the behaviors Americans associated with either the child or man. However, the fact that the audience not only felt comfortable with Hanks as a grown man performing a child’s role once again shows the shifting relationship the American public was developing between their notion of traditional values and values emerging during the 1980s.

The origins of the rap-dance Tom Hanks performs on Big, which he has been asked to perform on various talk shows over the past few years, is known most frequently as “Down Down Baby” and has become something of American popular culture lore. I

89 was not able to find an established origin for the rap-dance; however, Wikipedia defines

“Down Down Baby” as:

. . . a clapping game played by children in English-speaking countries . . . Modified versions of the song have appeared in Little Anthony and the Imperials’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop,” Nelly’s “Country Grammar,” Simian Mobile Disco’s “Hotdog,” The Drums’ “Let’s Go Surfing,” Carter USM’s “Turn On, Tune In, And Switch Off,” Bella Thorne and Zendaya’s “Conscious Love,” and the film Big. (Wikipedia.org 2018)

Additionally, the Wikipedia entry includes lyrics first shown on a 1980s segment of the

United States version of the children’s television show Sesame Street (Wikipedia.org

2018).

On October 25, 2016, Asian YouTube stars representing Wong Fu Productions remembered this twenty-nine second performance from Big so vividly they begged

Hanks to perform it (along with Ron Howard dancing in the background) when they were given the opportunity to interview Hanks, accompanying him in the performance with glee (Kaye 2016). Further, Hanks has informed audiences he inserted the rap into Big after watching his young son perform a version he learned at summer camp during the film’s shooting (Ralph 2016). I contend this rap-dance Hanks (as the manchild character

Josh Baskin) performs having come from Hanks’s own child’s game at a children’s summer camp further demonstrates the liminality of this foundational dance in Hanks’s early career. What is fascinating then is this child’s dance became one of the most frequently performed sequences from any of Tom Hanks’s forty-year acting history

(BBC 2009).

The film Big features Hanks’s character Josh Baskin, a thirteen-year-old who wishes on an arcade game named Voltar to be big after being too short for admittance on

90 a carnival ride. It is an impulsive decision, one made in the fear of being emasculated and embarrassed in front of his older female crush. Much to his horror, Josh wakes the next morning to find himself in the body of a man in his thirties. Like his previous character,

Bosom Buddy’s Kip Wilson, Tom Hanks’s Josh must also live in disguise, this time as a boy/man rather than as a man/woman. Again, just like in Bosom Buddies, only his best friend Billy will ultimately know his secret. Desperate and afraid of his new circumstances, Josh sneaks into the gym where his best friend returns basketball equipment, a punishment for performing so badly during practice. It is here Josh performs the rap-dance for his best friend, a symbol of their intimate friendship only the two of them know, in hopes Billy will be convinced it is indeed his best friend he sees before him in a transformed physiognomy (Marshall 1988).

“Down Down Baby”: An Analysis

The dance accompanying this twenty-nine second rap sequence is composed mostly of simple pedestrian gestures and movements, many of which mime the words.

The lyrics to the rap of this particular version are as follows:

The space goes down, down baby. Down, down the roller coaster. Sweet, sweet baby. Sweet, sweet, don’t let me go. Shimmy, shimmy, cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy, rock. Shimmy shimmy, cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy rock. I met a girlfriend—a triscuit. She said, a triscuit—a biscuit. Ice cream, soda pop, vanilla on the top. Ooh, Shelly’s out, walking down the street, ten times a week. I read it. I said it. I stole my mama’s credit. I’m cool. I’m hot. me in the stomach three more times. (Marshall 1988)

From the jump, the lyrics themselves establish the boys’ heterosexual identity and affirm their masculine positions. The song involves the recognizable markers of teen masculinity: heterosexual partnering (“Sweet sweet baby. Sweet, sweet, don’t let me go”;

91 “I met a girlfriend”; “Ooh, Shelly’s out, walking down the street), rebellion from the mother (“I stole my mama’s credit”), an affirmation of coolness or popularity (“I’m cool.

I’m hot”), and an affinity for playful violence as connection between boys (“Sock me in the stomach three more times.”) (Marshall 1988). These lyrics, combined with the fact they are rapped (another signification of coolness further addressed in Act Two), signify an affirmation within White masculinity.

At the beginning of the dance, the camera remains on Billy in a medium close-up shot. With the back and side of his hair wet with sweat, his lips partly open, Billy maintains a scared facial expression as we hear Josh loudly in the background.

As Josh performs the first chorus to the rap, the camera switches back to Josh, framed so the viewer cannot see Josh’s legs, thus allowing the viewer to only see Josh’s upper body shimmy while he extends alternating arms and slightly rotates his upper body. Josh performs the rap with growing desperation as witnessed by his stressed facial expression, his voice growing in speed and intensity, and his breath becoming shorter and more audible.

As Josh continues performing the rap while walking up the few stairs between the two characters, he gradually lessens the distance between the two of them. It becomes clear Billy gradually begins to believe Josh based solely on his recognition this dance is one only the two of them know. The camera focuses again on the tense muscles in Billy’s face, which steadily relax as he begins to quietly sing the words under his breath while

Josh continues his determined performance. When the camera shifts back to Josh rapping the words “a triscuit!” Josh swings his arms faster, ending with a snap of his fingers and

92 pointing in Billy’s direction. His body does not twist but remains facing Billy who is now out of the audience’s view. The final visual phrases often begin focused on Josh performing the gestures and the words and finish with Billy who finally joins him. By constructing a cinematic visual phrase beginning with Josh and seamlessly ending with

Billy, the film illustrates how trust has been re-established between the two characters.

Josh, within his new transformed role as a grown man, has no job, no home (the

“big” Josh is forced to vacate his home when his mother believes him to be the “little”

Josh’s captor), and no money. Thus, Josh needs an ally in his newfound predicament so it is of utmost importance he is able to find someone to believe in his transformation, a belief reached through the performance of the shared childhood dance. Bringing the audience into perhaps their own associated memories of childhood, in which the importance of shared experiences creates a bond between children, allows the viewers to also trust the bond between Josh and Billy as the dance is performed. It is not only Billy needing to be convinced of Josh; the audience, too, must be convinced this man is still a boy. Josh performs the dance to convince Billy he is indeed his best friend, and Tom

Hanks performs the dance for the audience members to convince them he is believable as a thirteen-year-old boy.

Instead of depicting the fear of two boys physically bonded, the bond is framed as a distanced portrayal of sensitivity and sweetness, once again establishing the image of the new 1980s man. The film Big depicted a new kind of intimacy through the genre of playful dancing. However, in this case, it is the image of two boys dancing on their own but in unison, connecting to the previous discussion of the Twist as opening American

93 social dance as a solo rather than partnered performance. Therefore, the trend of the

White male dancing as an individual is established in Big. Later in the film, a similar connection is shown between adult Josh Baskin and his superior MacMillan when they dance-play “Chopsticks” and “Heart-and-Soul” on a large floor keyboard in the gigantic toy store F.A.O. Schwarz. Although this dissertation does not focus on this sequence, it is yet another example whereby the film establishes a connection between two male figures through movement as it intersects with the liminal space between youth and adulthood.

In order to portray the emotional bond between the two boys, the camera largely focuses on the upper body and face for both characters throughout the scene. The emotive power enacted between the boys becomes highlighted as we see the intensity of their movements reflected in their faces, arms, and upper bodies. Further, Josh and Billy’s postures are loosely held; their arms when extended retain a pedestrian amount of slack; and their fists when closed never fold into a tight or angry expression. By not focusing on the legs, hips, and a display of skillful, intricate , a new technique for filming dance is thus employed which further creates a new image of the male dancer, one differing from the Swayze and Travolta personas of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The emphasis is displaced from the skilled technique of the trained dancer to the emotional intensity of the everyman dancer.

This reigning image of Tom Hanks as not only the manchild but also as

America’s Hollywood everyman emerged in large part due to the popularity of Big and its foundational dance scene. This section will end its examination of Tom Hanks as an early pioneer of the White Man Dance trope, one initiating the impetus of a new

94 American masculinity, one sensitive, vulnerable, and unafraid to show emotion, even if that emotion involves a bond between two males, with an analysis of his performance in the music video for the female pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen’s pop single “I Really Like

You.” To close, I will further explore this new liminal masculinity through Hanks’s dance performance in this music video released thirty years later at the end of his ongoing acting career.

The Power of the Maybe: Carly Rae, Tom Hanks, and Bubblegum Pop

When Tom Hanks wakes up, it is still dark outside. The wall-to-wall windows in

his bedroom reveal the bright cityscape of . Tom wakes up in song. It

isn’t his manly voice we hear, however, but the voice of bubble-gum pop singer

Carly Rae; whose hit “” took the world by storm. Tom sings as he

washes his face and brushes his teeth; walks the streets and greets his fans with

high fives, autographs, and selfies; and makes calls on his cellphone in a cab and

texts playful emojis back and forth with Carly Rae. He continues to sing as he

exits the cab and briefly meets with a director for the music video he’s going to

perform in with Carly Rae. Tom finishes the song with Carly Rae in tow as they

perform a flash mob synchronized dance joined by pop stars like Justin Bieber

and a team of dancers behind them. As Tom and Carly Rae sing with the others,

they chassé and shimmy down a cobblestoned path until the camera fades out.

The blog and online media network Gawker’s Emma Carmichael in “Have You

Heard Call Me Maybe, the New Perfect Pop Song” regarding Canadian singer Jepsen’s explosive hit song in 2012, “Call Me Maybe,” declares:

95 She’s recorded a flawless pop song. . . . We’re fast approaching the phase in which we will be virtually incapable of escaping the song and its strident disco strings and that horribly catchy hook. Resistance is futile, people: As much as I want to this song, I have listened to it seven times today (maybe more like 10 times). (2012)

The endlessly catchy pop melody of 2012 also spawned countless music video parodies and dance crew videos, including one performed by Marines stationed in Afghanistan that was revisited by actor Matt McGorry (whose dancing I addressed in this dissertation’s introduction) using the song “Hollaback Girl” during a for his character on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. For the music video for Jepsen’s second hit single, “I Really Like You” (Jepsen 2015), she enlisted Tom Hanks to provide the lipsync and dance, offering a gendered extension of Hanks’s purposefully unsuccessful burlesquing of feminine impersonation introduced in his debut role in

Bosom Buddies.

Unlike the dance sequence in the film Big, the music video for “I Really Like

You” is able to rely on the American public’s forty-year familiarity of Hanks as a celebrity, combined with the popularity of Jepsen’s previous pop sensation “Call Me

Maybe.” An important aspect of the quality of Hanks’s lip sync, which contributes to the masculinity-affirming image of Hanks, is that, unlike many actors who perform cross- gendered lip sync in various popular cultural television moments,19 Hanks does not burlesque femininity or perform a drag-inspired performance in his lip sync of this song.

19 See various lip sync battles performed by and his invited guests on Starring Jimmy Fallon (2014-2018) as well as the cable television show these battles inspired, “Lip Sync Battle,” which previously aired on the network largely targeting male viewers, Spike, and has since been moved to The Paramount Network (2015-2018).

96 He also does not perform this lip sync in a camp aesthetic often associated with drag.20 In this way Hanks can be viewed as possibly troubling the signification of gender portrayal by underplaying the lip sync performance of Jepsen’s bubbly high-pitched voice. The comic thrust of Jepsen’s music video can be read to depend in part upon the comically stark contrast between Hanks’s older, well established, masculine image and the high- pitched feminine characteristics associated with Jepsen’s singing voice.

This disparity between the male/female representation in the video also contrasts

Hanks’s cross-dressing performance on the previously discussed show Bosom Buddies, in which Hanks “misperformed” his character’s imperfectly-executed impersonation of female gender expression to comic effect. Additionally, the dance’s simplistic construction aids in illustrating Hanks’s seemingly organic and naturally masculine way of moving rather than overly articulated as within the burlesque mode. The video culminates in an image also relying upon Hanks’s early work with Big as the dance embodies a kind of childlike abandon, a in the street among frolicking friends. The fact that Justin Bieber, known for his set choreography in music videos and live performances, joins him at the end of the video seemingly validates Hanks’s accepted membership in American popular cultural dancing by White men despite the fact the dance itself is depicted as something the average person might do with his/her own friends rather than as a carefully choreographed performance such as one Bieber might perform on stage during a musical concert or a music video. However, what I find most significant in Hanks’s work within this medium of White men dancing is his

20 See Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp” included in the collection of essays titled Against Interpretation, originally published in 1964 (2001).

97 embodiment of White masculinity while working within these gender-troubling performatives to question what it means exactly to be a White male in American popular culture.

Both of the dance sequences analyzed in this section combine the quotidian singing performance accompanied by gestural dance movement. Although the movements are not particularly difficult to execute, Hanks depicts them as natural and sincere, performing the movements from both sequences with a clear sense of rhythm and physical coordination. Not only that, Hanks performs the moves confidently with apparent enjoyment. Because Hanks’s masculinity is always already affirmed, the dance he performs does not upset the balance. More to the point, there remains a masculine quality in the execution of both dance performances, and Hanks is depicted in both of the examples as an everyman rather than as a professionally trained dancer. Occupying a slightly more masculine version of Kimmel’s “Great American Wimp,” as discussed earlier in this dissertation’s prologue, Hanks appears nonthreatening and the dances he performs contribute to that image. However, in both sequences I would propose Hanks does complicate the gender structures embedded within these texts via the liminality of gender performance in differing ways as discussed throughout this section. In the following section, I will analyze sequences featuring the comic actor Steve Carell who offers a more contemporary perspective on the White dancing everyman.

The Comedian Pretending To Be a Buffoon: Steve Carell’s Lovable Fool

In The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain, the text inspiring this section’s title, author Laura Bass states, “[T]he buffoon is truly a

98 buffoon; but the comedian, who plays a laughing role, pretends to be a buffoon” (2009,

54). In American popular culture, the White male comedian and actor Steve Carell has gradually cultivated a persona on screen epitomizing the best and worst of the everyman buffoon archetype over the course of his long-standing career. Although many viewers are familiar with what can be found online of Carell’s work with the improvisation troupe , where actor and comedian Stephen Colbert was famously once his understudy, Carell’s first credited role on American television was as the voice of Gary in the animated comedy sketch parody addressing the homoerotic undertones of and

Robin, “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” which originally debuted on The

Show before residing permanently on SNL in 1996. Although debatable how many viewers might know Carell’s contribution to the popular animated sketch, Carell first rose to significant popularity in American television via his role as a correspondent on the

American news and late-night talk show television program with

Jon Stewart from 1999 to 2005, the longest running program on Comedy Central then hosted by comedian . Carell developed what I read as a deadpan Keatonesque delivery in his satirical impersonation of an everyman as a broadcast journalist, a delivery he would build on in various roles in film and television throughout his acting career but most embodied in the character for which he is most known as Michael Scott, the

Regional Manager of the Scranton office of the paper company Dunder Mifflin, in the

American adaptation of the network-broadcast television show The Office (2005-2013).

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart shared similarities with The Office in its employment of the mockumentary format, thus enabling Steve Carell to employ similar

99 performing techniques between the reality of the show and asides to the supposed audience. Although the first season of The Office debuted to average ratings, the resulting success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which also represented Carell as a middle-aged stunted everyman, caused the show’s ratings to explode for the remainder of the show’s duration (Brodesser-Akner and Adalian 2010). Carell began to be associated with a very specific type of White male persona he comically performed in various images throughout his career in American popular culture: the lovable-but-painfully-awkward middle-aged buffoon. However, the humor of the Steve Carell persona relied at least in part on viewers’ knowledge that the actor Steve Carell was in actuality the opposite of the stock character he performed throughout various audiovisual texts.

This section, then, will offer a reading of Steve Carell’s contribution to the White

Man Dance trope via one segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and one sequence integrated into an episode of The Office. Relying on theories developed by silent film scholars Dan Kamin and Noël Carroll, I ultimately argue Carell extends the deadpan delivery he developed in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to include a Chaplinesque exaggerated physical comedy in his persona as The Office’s Michael Scott. This movement-based comic persona, embodied in a quotidian role such as the boss of an office, provides a crucial contribution to the White Man Dance type.

The Deadpan Buffoon Versus the Hyperbolic Clown

In order to fully situate my reading of Steve Carell’s comic technique as a merging of Buster Keaton’s deadpan buffoon persona with Charlie Chaplin’s overly exaggerated clown archetype, I find it necessary to first establish Keaton and Chaplin’s

100 comedic strategies. Both philosopher Noël Carroll and Chaplin scholar/performer Dan

Kamin offer foundational theories on the techniques of Keaton and Chaplin renowned for their work in the silent film era, both of whom could be argued to have influenced

Carell’s particular contribution to the White Man Dance trope.

Best known for his silent films in the 1920s, American comedian Buster Keaton began his career as a small child, during which he performed regularly on the vaudeville stage with his father. According to Rick DesRochers in The New Humor in the

Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian, “[H]ow Keaton became a ‘Buster’ is a vaudeville . Keaton himself claimed that the famous escape artist

Harry Houdini named him after watching the young Keaton go crashing offstage, then returned to the boards unscathed. ‘My, what a buster!’ Houdini exclaimed . . .” (2014,

49). After this, the name stuck. DesRochers continues to retell a well known narrative about Keaton’s early vaudeville duets with his father, consisting of a dominant image of

“a five-year-old boy being thrown across and offstage by his father, and audiences of adults and children alike laughing as the boy bounces back onstage, thwarting his father’s efforts to control him” (49). This early physical comedy training in American vaudeville stunts as a young boy informed much of the physically adept stunts Keaton would later employ in his silent film comedies.

Noël Carroll argues in his book-length phenomenological study of Buster

Keaton’s bodily intelligence, Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor and

Bodily Coping, that although Keaton’s gags appear as the inherent “absence of bodily intelligence” (2009, 6), Carroll asserts it is in fact because of Keaton’s own presence of

101 that same intelligence that Keaton is able to perform, stage, and cinematically edit those gags. In other words, the audience is aware the deadpan performance mask Keaton became associated with was exactly that, a mask, and that beneath the “mismanagement of things due to the lack of bodily intelligence” (2009, 7) viewers witness on screen and on stage, viewers were also aware it was indeed because of Keaton’s intricate understanding of bodily intelligence these gags were able to be constructed in the first place. Not only does Keaton’s relationship to the apparent lack of bodily intelligence provide the comic thrust witnessed in Carell’s performance of Michael Scott but it is also a relationship inherent in the development of the White Man Dance trope. In other words, just as in physical comedy, the White Man dancer is consciously constructing an apparent lack of bodily intelligence when it comes to dancing, all the while the audience knows an adept awareness of bodily intelligence is needed in order to construct and perform that supposed lack of intelligence. In a sense, one could consider this tension between the behind-the-scenes bodily intelligence and the character embodiment of the very lack of that bodily intelligence as yet another liminality expressed in Carell’s embodiment of the

White man dance(r).

Another comedic strategy Keaton employs throughout his films, which Steve

Carell makes use of in the construction of his own comedic persona, involves fixity of attention and automatism. As Carroll states in his analysis of Keaton’s film The General, the character Johnny’s “fixity of attention, based on the failure to adjust ideas to the changing factors of a situation, provokes our laughter. It is a laughter at a kind of paradigmatic carelessness that fails to heed what is almost literally before the subject’s

102 very eyes” (2009, 31). Later in his analysis, he further explains this theme of fixity of attention as “a certain rigidity or inflexibility of behavior premised on characters’ inattention to alterations in the environment. The characters seem laughable to the degree that they appear to be automatons” (2009, 32). In other words, Keaton’s deadpan face merges with a kind of inattention to the shifting modes of the world around him as though he were not a human being in actuality, which most audiences should associate with adapting to the changing world around them. Throughout The Office, for example, the audience watches Michael Scott and his right-hand man Dwight Schrute construct many pranks, stunts, and dances that largely fail because they are too singularly focused on the act to see what is happening around them: “[Keaton] is so preoccupied with his conception of the situation that he ignores all of the available information that diverges from his fixed idea” (2009, 32).

These comedic strategies of Keaton’s, which could be interpreted as figuring largely in the character of Michael Scott, influence the development of the White Man

Dance archetype, in which the White Man who dances is also one inattentive to social cues or other changing images in the environment.21 Although I argue Carell does employ a Keatonesque facial deadpan expression and inability to focus on the cues in his environment as displayed in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Office, Carell’s

21 For example, in the beginning of the episode “Niagara: Part 1” in Season 6 of The Office, , the White male character operating as a “” throughout the show’s run, calls a conference with the staff on how to behave at his and coworker Pam Beasley’s wedding. Jim has written on a white board in the conference room a list of “Do’s” and “Don’ts.” Although one of the “do’s” on the list is dancing, it comes with a condition: “Dance when it’s appropriate.” This is another example of how one is socialized to dance in proper contexts and alludes to a history of Michael Scott’s previous behavior of dancing at inappropriate times (2009).

103 brand of physical comedy also speaks to the work of another silent film star, Charlie

Chaplin.

Dan Kamin’s seminal text, The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion

(2008), provides the most detailed analysis of Chaplin’s rhetoric of movement throughout his films. Kamin’s own movement and theater practice, which includes a comedy program titled “Comedy in Motion” (2012) and his popular cultural work staging both the movement sequences in the biopic Chaplin with Robert Downey, Jr. (Attenborough

1992) and the physical comedy sequences in the feature film Benny and Joon with actor

Johnny Depp (Chechik 1993), informs this text on the themes and techniques of

Chaplin’s unique brand of physical humor. Kamin’s ultimate argument is that Chaplin’s art is one of movement. What I would argue is Steve Carell borrows his physical comedic strategies from Chaplin, which will be illustrated in the next section, techniques Kamin describes as “a central element of Chaplin’s comic style, his serious demeanor in the midst of slapstick ” and “a boisterous physicality” (2008, 6-7). Carroll supports this view of Chaplin, stating his performance of his stock character the Tramp employs gestures of an “extreme, exaggerated comic sort” (2009, 126) and “pure, aesthetic playfulness” (2009, 133).

However, perhaps the most important theme of Chaplin’s I would argue further lends itself to Carell’s physical embodiment of Michael Scott is the use of the tragicomic.

Chaplin’s own text, simply titled My Autobiography, offers a number of insights regarding his technique of using movement to elicit comedy as emerging from the tragic aspects of life. Chaplin has long been considered a rags-to-riches story as Chaplin’s own

104 youth was contextualized by the hardships of poverty in England but when he became a seemingly overnight success as an American filmmaker, Chaplin suddenly became a man of great wealth. Throughout his autobiography, Chaplin makes clear it was the combination of “the tragic and the comic” (1964, 40) he aimed to evoke in his films throughout his career. Carroll also addresses this theme of loneliness-infused comedy in

Chaplin’s work, stating “Chaplin composes the scene in such a way that the Tramp is outside of virtually everyone else’s sight-lines: he is effectively invisible” (2009, 128).

Finally, Kamin references the intersection of Chaplin’s dance-like movements and his embodiment of the sad fool when he declares, “his comic mishaps are choreographed as carefully as any ballet. To take a fall in real life is painful and sometimes tragic; to fall repeatedly and without harm on film, as Chaplin does in almost every film he made, is to make light of life’s inevitable misfortunes” (2008, 74). Similarly with Chaplin’s Tramp,

The Office’s Michael Scott is constructed repeatedly throughout the show’s series as a tragic figure. This element of pathos also makes watching Scott move, stumble, and fall in embarrassing and buffoonish ways likewise tragicomic.

These theories of the comedic and performing strategies at work in the films and performances of influential silent film comedians Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin will provide a theoretical lens through which to view the following readings of Steve Carell’s movement sequences in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Office. The comedic techniques associated with Keaton and Chaplin can be seen as ultimately converging in

Carell’s construction of his Michael Scott persona. Grounded in the audience’s knowledge and similar to the ways in which the audiences of Keaton and Chaplin

105 recognized the difference between the filmmakers as auteurs and their character personas,

Carell is far from the personality type depicted in the show. It is this distinction I propose lends much of the comic power to Carell’s most distinctive work as the White everyman archetype.

“Slimming Down With Steve—Dancing”: An Analysis

Dressed in a conservative black suit, host Jon Stewart introduces the segment

“Slimming Down With Steve,” which aired on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on June

21, 2001. Stewart prefaces the segment from his seated place behind a news desk, stating with a smirk, “[A]s I mentioned earlier, Steve Carell has struggled with his weight for years now, having waged a very public battle to get healthy. Steve joins us now. Steve.”

The camera shot widens to include Carell dressed in a similarly modest suit. Carell formally thanks Stewart, employing a recognizable format from traditional news shows.

Carell proceeds to contextualize the segment for the audience. In a more serious intimate stance, Carell leans forward, his intertwined hands placed on the table while he confesses the following: “It’s been a battle indeed. And while I can’t say I’ve lost weight, nor do I feel better about myself emotionally, some people do think that I have a catchy theme song. My name is Steve” (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart 2001). Even in this introduction, one can read the comic liminality between the deadpan approach of his delivery combined with the content of what he is saying, such as admitting he has not lost weight nor does he feel better about himself.

At this point in the segment, the audience is not yet aware Steve has taken on dancing as his latest attempt to lose weight. However, viewers of the show are aware of

106 the satiric brand of humor framing the show and that this is a character of Steve Carell’s construction ironically also known as Steve Carell. A similar device is used with a similar show airing on the same network at the same time period, The Colbert Report, in which

Stephen Colbert played a conservative persona he also called Stephen Colbert (The

Colbert Report 2005-2014). Additionally, the satire-driven show is intended as a kind of comic commentary on actual news reporting shows. Therefore, the segment is already structured as a kind of mockery of White men associated with more traditional forms of exercise.

The segment opens with a shot of Carell running in sweats and sneakers on a

Manhattan sidewalk in the winter. A parody rock jingle featuring Carell’s voice singing the segment’s title plays as he runs through a banner also bearing the title bouncing across the screen. The shot cuts to two middle-aged White women standing in front of a mural on a brick façade who cheer him on: “Go Steve!” The camera switches back to

Steve as he pauses in front of his own image reflected in a building’s glass window. He places a hand on each hip, sucking in his gut and shaking his head. The camera cuts back to a woman’s mouth, presumably one of the two women cheering him on earlier, as she cheers again, “Go Steve!” He continues to run past a group of men and women talking on the sidewalk, which he then encourages with a simple wave of his hand to join him. They immediately begin to follow him. At the end of this introduction, the song plays “Slim down . . .” and the camera cuts to a head and torso shot of Carell who says “with me” and gives the camera two thumbs. The shot remains as a backdrop of Slimming Down appears behind him, and the word Dancing is sandwiched between his two hands giving the

107 thumbs up sign. This is the first sign of the comedic provocation of the segment, as it relies on the audience’s surprise to find a man jogging, an expected activity for a man to perform to lose weight, that to shift to the unexpected activity of him “dancing.”

In the next scene, Carell walks casually down another sidewalk still dressed in his sweatshirt. Carell begins to explain his choice in voiceover: “I’ve tried everything to lose weight. Nutrition, boxing, jogging, even plastic surgery. But these methods weren’t doing the trick. So I headed to Crunch Gym to find out about the latest fitness craze, Ethnic

Dancing.” As he mentions each fitness trend he has already attempted with no success, a picture of him doing each activity in previous segments of the series floats vertically across the screen. As Carell exclaims he will try Ethnic Dancing, he points at the list of classes on a piece of paper in his hand while standing in the gym’s lobby, giving another thumbs up.

Carell introduces the first stop on his dancing excursion as he performs the moves in a class: “First stop, south of the border for some Latino grooves.” As Carell hitches one hand to one hip and rotates the other arm extended upwards, he swivels his hips in a circle surrounded by women of various ages and sizes executing the same movement. His attire of sweats stands out among the rest dressed in formfitting athletic pants and tank tops. The shot moves to include the male instructor dressed in a tight orange tank top sporting the gym’s logo, athletic pants, and a baseball , wearing an exuberant smile on his face. His over-articulation of his abs and hips stands in sharp contrast to Carell’s whose blank expression accentuates the comic differentiation between the two men with regards to their masculine (or lack thereof) presentation. In the next shot Carell comically

108 thrusts his pelvis with an over-exaggerated concentrated expression on his face. His arms, hands held in fists, are bent at the shoulders and extend out in front of him while he lightly bites his tongue that sticks out slightly as he furrows his eyebrows. Again the camera depicts the contrast between Carell and the women behind him who hold their arms light and fluid, their hands open with loose smiling expressions on their faces.

As the shot widens to show the entire class, Carell stands in the middle, explaining he was the only man in the class and is “surrounded by beautiful, perspiring women.” He hops sideways on his feet, which are hip distance apart, one hand holding his stomach and the other at shoulder height extended straight out in front of him. As he continues to describe the women in sexual terms (“clad in but the skimpiest of ”), the camera depicts a woman in slow motion donning a vest, a top, and formfitting black , her pierced navel exposed. The camera shows him more comically performing various over-exerted facial expressions, moving his head quickly from side to side with his tongue sticking out as he continues the moves. As he explains his failure at dancing in the class, the camera switches between his foolish expression of the movements and the previously described scantily-clad woman in her seductive hip gyrations: “I tried to keep up as they swiveled their supple hips to the pulsating Latin rhythms.”

The segment continues this view of Carell as a man sexually aroused by the other dancers in the room as he bumbles around the moves awkwardly. A “boing” noise effect can be heard just as the camera depicts Carell in a close-up, his lips pursed together and his eyebrows furrowed in concentration, the veins in his sweaty red forehead bulging

109 while the following voiceover exclamation is heard in the background: “Uh oh! This wasn’t slimmin’ down with Steve.” The camera then shows Carell looking from side to side self-consciously as he states comically for the audience, “[T]his was sporting wood with Steve. Yeah, this was a class for the girls, and this guy.” The camera then depicts the instructor again, focusing again on his skintight tank top, enthusiastic grin, and sashaying hips, implying he might be homosexual, especially given he does not seem to have

Carell’s same problem of arousal. “I clearly did not fit in here,” Carell concludes. “I was sticking out like a sore thumb. On to class number two . . . belly dancing.” Carell walks out in the middle of the class.

The next class the segment reveals to the audience seems instantly primed for comedy as the segment implies Carell leaves the prior class due to being aroused by the women’s seductive clothing and behavior. Given that response, it seems as though he would have a similar problem in a belly dancing class. As an impersonation of a buffoonish everyman, it is a particularly amusing parody and could be read as an example of Keaton’s performed lack of awareness to societal cues and the changing environment.

Carell asks the instructor, “[W] sort of muscles am I going to be working out when I learn to bellydance?” The segment then introduces the dance instructor with her name and the title “ Instructor” as she answers: “The stomach, first of all, because it’s belly dance. Also, the thigh, the calves.” The instructor wears a long-sleeved emblazoned with the gym’s logo and a fabric containing fake gold coins. The camera widens to include Carell who humorously also wears a red around his as he listens with deadpan attention. The instructor touches him on the arm as she asks, “[A]re

110 we going to dance now?” Without changing his stoic expression, he says with overt seriousness accompanied by a nod of his head: “Let’s dance.”

The camera presents only the lower half of both figures’ bodies, the instructor’s defined legs draped in opaque red cut at the ankle with gold and Carell’s undefined legs in comparison swimming in his oversized with his running shoes. As the camera gradually moves up the body to end on the two figures from above the head to just below the waist, the instructor guides Carell: “Legs parallel, we start our shimmies.” The instructor’s chin is raised upwards, her body and arms held erect while she shimmies her hips, the coins jingling. Carell in contrast looks downward with his arms dangling loosely at his side while shaking his mid-torso slowly from left to right. As she continues Carell stops to painfully hold his bottom with his hands. He tries again with the same pained expression on his face, explaining to the instructor: “[N]ow see, here, all

I’m feeling is that my ass is just jiggling.” The instructor confirms his misgivings about the movement with her own muted expression: “Yeah, that’s because you have fat back there. But it’s all right.”

The class continues to focus on the arms. Carell undulates each arm alternately with a consistent blank expression on his face, his lips slightly parted. The instructor praises him for this movement while accompanying him with the same motion. She then asks him how much dance experience he has had. Given what the audience has already witnessed of his dancing, Carell humorously responds, “[T]en years.” She asks what dance he has practiced and Carell comically answers, “[T]ap.” These answers delivered with Carell’s deadpan expression spark laughter from the studio audience given he

111 answers her question about his ability to execute an arm movement by possibly pretending he has trained in a dance form focusing almost solely on movements of the feet.

They move back to the hips, stepping with one foot and the hip out, and then repeating the movement on the other side of the body as Carell’s voiceover can be heard explaining, “[T]he instructor had to know what she was working with, so I showed her a recent photo.” Given the two have just had a conversation about Carell’s supposed dance training, a viewer probably will expect this photo to be a performance shot of

Carell performing tap dancing. The camera instead zooms in on a comical photo of

Carell’s head digitally attached to the body of an obese man posing nude on a mattress in front of red velvet curtains, a black square blocking out his penis. Carell begins to excuse the photo as he offers the following disclaimer: “I have a forty-seven inch waist. How long will it take for me to go from this to a size thirty?” Without laughter or embarrassment, the camera closes in on his serious face, moving back and forth between his face and the instructor as she answers, “[R]ealistically? Two to three years.” She then points to the black square to inquire as to what it conceals. He responds without missing a beat, wearing his same deadpan face and unmoved vocal inflection, that the black square is “a birthmark.”

As the class moves into its final exercise, the instructor attempts to teach Carell how to gyrate his hips. First, she attempts to do this standing stage right of him. Carell imitates her, his hips wide and loose rather than the tight circles the teacher forms. She then moves to stand in front of him so he can more clearly see her rotations. Carell

112 responds as he did in the Latin grooves class with the repeated “Uh oh” in voiceover accompanied by the previously-used “boing” sound effect with his expression of the dance move “[U]ndulation,” signifying yet another erection caused by the dance class. He continues to explain as the class proceeds: “There’s that pesky wood again.” Apparently trying to calm down his erection, Carell stumbles a bit over his words as he rubs his face with his elbow, asking as he stutters, “I’m sorry. Could you show me that again? I wasn’t really looking.” The camera closes in on the instructor’s hips as she swivels them from left to right while Carell’s voiceover concludes: “I needed a dance workout that wouldn’t give me a boner.” In these two classes, the segment relies on a great deal of themes illustrated in the White Man Dance sketch, accentuated by Carell’s Keatonesque delivery—his deadpan manner combined with a continuous return to his arousal of women, affirming his masculinity in his failure to perform due to that arousal.

Carell moves onto , a dance form assumedly fitting his needs given its male dominance and lack of women performing sexually suggestive moves such as pelvic thrusts and hip gyrations. As he explains: “But before I could take off the pounds, I needed to learn some basic moves. So I had legendary dancer Kwik Step get down for me.” The breakdance instructor is dressed in all black with sneakers and a blue hat. Kwik

Step appears to be a light-skinned Black dancer, offering a commentary on the history of

Black dancers teaching White men dance moves as discussed earlier in this dissertation.

He breaks down a move slowly as Carell tries to execute it next to him on a basketball court with a group of various skaters and breakdancers watching from behind. As Kwik

Step performs the move at the intended , Carell watches with a look of concentration.

113 Kwik Step ends the move by walking past Carell as he playfully battles him with the

Black hip hop vernacular phrase, “[W]hat’s up, biatch?” Carell’s voiceover exaggeratedly declares with a comic misunderstanding of the meaning of the word “biatch” implied in

Kwik Step’s bboy challenge when Carell responds by saying, “I was already his bitch,” over-accentuating the word without the vernacular change in pronunciation employed by

Kwik Step. In other words, Kwik Step refers to him as “biatch” in a playful usage of the term in hip hop dialect while Carell internalizes it within his normative understanding of the term as the derogatory term often signifying a position of submission.22

Kwik Step continues to challenge Carell, gesturing to him in hip hop-based hand movements and slang: “Let me see them skills. What’s up?” Although Carell’s voiceover claims a confidence over the material—“Before long, I was truly starting to get the hang of it.”—Carell performs an execution of the move unrecognizable from Kwik Step’s demonstration. Carell then performs a series of rock steps while swinging his arms out, fully standing, to end on his back in an awkward attempt at a back roll. As he rolls back and forth on the ground Carell grimaces while holding his back. The camera slowly moves away from Carell’s body, clearly unable to perform the moves and seemingly unaware of how badly he performs them, to a clear stunt double in his same clothes, adeptly performing virtuosic bboy tricks to the crowd cheering him on. “I had my groove on, and it was time to kick it old school,” Carell exclaims, the idiomatic expression fitting the bboy culture but out of sync with Carell’s persona and body. The camera shifts back

22 The distinction between “bitch” and the hip hop derivative of the word, which has been spelled variously as either “biatch” or “beeotch,” can be further distinguished in connotation by visiting the terms “beeotch” and “bitch” in “Terms of the 90s, Slang of the Nineties” (Grosvenor, Jr., 2012).

114 and forth from the stunt double over-performing moves to an over-the-body shot of

Carell on the floor spinning with a pained grimace on his face. The segment finally ends on Carell at with a knowing smirk on his face as he lands on his side, his lower leg extended straight out, his upper foot bent at the knee, one hand on his hip, the other cradling his head.

The segment concluded, the camera returns to Stewart and Carell back at the news desk to reveal a stunned expression on Stewart’s face as he admits he is impressed. As

Carell jokingly refers to his transformation, he suddenly can express himself in lingo purposely mixed with traditional speech and hip hop slang: “By the end of the afternoon,

I was thick with mad skills. I might even venture to say that I had become an official member of da bomb squad.” Carell does confess one problem occurred during his venture into dancing: he is “going to have to have [my] lamb chop on the flippity flop.” The two men continue this vaudevillian duet of jokes commenting on White men attempting hip hop slang as Stewart timidly admits he doesn’t understand what Carell means. Carell then translates he will have to have “his hip replaced,” heightening the satire in the audience expecting Carell to so suddenly excel at dancing.

This segment briefly establishes how Carell was able to establish a comic persona of White masculinity. By using the deadpan imperfection of a White man taking dance classes in order to lose weight, something already unexpected for White men to attempt,

Carell satirically comments on many of the themes in the White Man Dance trope. What will be shown in the next section, which focuses on Carell’s performance in The Office, is

115 how Carell adapts his Keatonesque delivery to include a Chaplinesque over-performance of movement and physical comedy.

A Buffoonish Montage of Chaplin and Keaton: The Office’s Michael Scott

In a tenth-anniversary profile on The Office in IndieWire titled “‘The Office’ 10

Years Later: Why Michael Scott is One of the Most Original Characters of All Time,” cultural critic Anya Jaremko-Greenwold addresses the paper company regional manager’s complexity as portrayed by Steve Carell: “On the surface, the regional manager of Scranton’s Dunder Mifflin paper company was a two-dimensional imbecile; racist, chauvinistic, and culturally tactless. . . . But despite his weak points, the character is more than the sum of his foolish parts” (2015). Although Jaremko-Greenwold importantly addresses the problematic expressions of racism and sexism repeatedly depicted by Michael Scott in the show, she also points out the ultimate universality of his character when she states that Michael Scott “is so deeply flawed, reminding us, in the end, that there’s a little Michael Scott in all of us.” A more recent take on The Office is

Jaya Sexena’s “Does The Office Hold Up?” where she questions a deeper problematic element emerging out of satire, especially given the recent rise of accusations of sexual assault and sexual abuse in the workplace, largely referred to by mainstream media as the

#metoo movement: “But does a self-aware comedy about bad workplace behavior feel the same when so many of day-to-day conversations are about workplace abuse?”

Further, as Sexena states later in the piece, “[B]ut upon rewatching, it feels like we’re supposed to be laughing just because they’re naming the problem. . . . If Michael is the obvious , then Jim, the erstwhile hero, is the man who sees the abuse and stays

116 silent for his own benefit” (2018). What becomes clear in these two depictions addressing

The Office in differing ways is that satire is a tricky business, one made trickier by a country divided by privilege and power.

One of the ways in which the show depicts the most foolish, comically unaware aspects of Michael Scott’s character is in scenes where he dances in order to garner validation and attention from his employees. In his most work-centered attitude, Scott can be read as the deadpan Keaton, clearly unaware of how the other characters, including the imagined audience of the mockumentary format, view him. As a performer within the show itself, Carell embodies the most distinctive hyperbolic movements of Chaplin, made more tragicomic by the depiction of office boss Scott’s desperate need to be both taken seriously by his staff as well as his deep desire to be his employee’s intimates. This section will close with a reading of a dance sequence Michael Scott performs in order to impress his staff early in the show’s series, in the episode titled “Booze Cruise,” in season two, episode eleven, which aired on January 5, 2006 on NBC.

“Booze Cruise”: An Analysis

The episode centers around Michael Scott’s decision the company will attend a booze cruise under the professional guise Michael Scott will provide a motivational speech for the staff. However, a power struggle ensues when the captain of the boat takes control of the evening’s activities, thwarting Michael Scott’s plans. Over the series the staff does gradually grow to sympathize with Michael Scott and the everyman in Michael

Scott gradually understands how to form a stable committed romantic relationship and sustain friendships with many of his staff. However, at this point in the show, Michael

117 Scott mostly causes the staff discomfort, evidenced by both mock confessions and imagined interviews to the mockumentary camera crew, as well as through explicit verbal resistance to Michael Scott’s inappropriate escapades like this one. The dance occurs at the booze cruise during one of Michael Scott’s many attempts to usurp control from the captain. Instead of allowing Michael Scott use of the microphone so he can give his motivational speech, the captain competitively claims it is time for a dance contest instead. Clueless as ever, Michael Scott decides to use the dance contest to motivate his staff instead, immediately renaming it a “motivational” dance contest (The Office 2006).

Michael Scott runs to the small dance floor on the ship as instrumentals to Sean

Paul’s “Get Busy” play in the background. As he comically swings his arms back and forth wildly while jumping with an exaggerated expression of concentration on his face, the camera gradually pans over his audience consisting of other attendees on the cruise as well as his staff. The employees wear on their faces expressions of embarrassment and discomfort, shown in a series of close-up shots. At one point, Phyllis, one of Scott’s employees, hangs her head in shame. The camera returns to Michael Scott, who slaps his hands against his knees while continuing to dance buffoonishly for the crowd, clearly unaware his moves are not getting the desired reaction, lips pursed in overt concentration just as they were in The Daily Show with John Stewart segment. Behind him, the camera briefly depicts Jim attempting to stifle his own laughter. This comparison between the two men is a crucial one frequently employed throughout the series to enhance the comic thrust of Michael Scott’s ridiculousness. Even in a later episode, when Jim marries Pam, his co-worker and lifelong crush, the show quite pointedly never shows Jim dance as he

118 represents the “straight man” in the comedic ensemble and thus the image of stoic, hegemonic White masculinity.

Michael Scott continues his dance, this time facing the audience itself. This moment illustrates the earlier established themes embedded in Keaton’s characters’ lack of awareness with the changing environment. Now that he faces the audience, one would assume he would perhaps stop dancing, realizing his poor performance has caused the audience to be disinterested and uncomfortable. However, there remains no change in his delivery as he continues to smack his knees and chest like a buffoon and dance in hyperbolic movements. The movements themselves are Chaplinesque in their over- exaggerated manner while Scott’s lack of awareness holds much in common with

Keaton’s comic mechanism.

As Michael Scott moves onto a different dance move, the audience can hear him say in voiceover presumably to the mockumentary crew: “Sometimes you just have to be the boss of dancing.” With his mouth open, he shakes his shoulders up and down. He spreads his fingers open as his shoulder movements extend downward to his arms bent at the elbows. His expression shifts from a more Keatonesque deadpan to a Chaplinesque exaggeration, his mouth open, his tongue sticking out, his eyes wide, and his eyebrows lifted. As the camera pans to more looks of confusion from the audience within the show, including the Black staff member Darryl whose inclusion could be read as policing

Michael Scott’s poor attempts at dancing to Jamaican , Michael Scott’s dance moves only get more extreme. Scott has now moved to the floor to perform a torso roll.

This move is comically “misperformed” as he thwacks his body against the dance floor.

119 The dance ends with Michael Scott absurdly performing more dance moves, his hands moving back and forth with limp wrists, wiggling his hips from left to right, and moving his feet back and forth. The scene concludes with Jim who offers a kind of policing of

Michael Scott’s White masculinity in his final aghast expression: open mouthed and wide-eyed.

Both satiric comments on the White Man Dance trope, these two sequences demonstrate Steve Carell’s contribution to the White Man consciously performing badly in order to make a statement on the trope itself. Both audiovisual texts rely on the knowledge that Steve Carell as a comic actor embodies the opposite persona of what both products demonstrate. In “Slimming Down with Steve—Dancing,” Steve Carell performs a persona of himself, making a comment on how the average White male perceives learning how to dance. In the dance sequence incorporated in the fictional landscape of

“Booze Cruise,” a similar comment is made in which a White man who dances is emasculated, and one who chooses to dance must always already be a man too eager for acceptance from the public to be “masculine enough.” Carell employs the techniques pioneered by Keaton and Chaplin in order to contribute to the stereotype that White men can’t dance, and those who do embody the clown or buffoon archetype.

To conclude, the White Man Dance as seen from everymen Tom Hanks and Steve

Carell evolves from an image supporting the construction of archetypal White masculinity to one questioning the relationship between dance and masculinity or dance and heterosexuality. With Tom Hanks and Steve Carell, in differing ways and embodying differing historical underpinnings, the archetypal everyman persona was placed alongside

120 dance to bring about new insights in American masculinity. The analyses of movement in

Act One, Scene Two will illustrate how the White Man Dance can serve as a kind of mockery of gender and sexuality norms, particularly as illustrated in 1980s rock musician’s Billy Squier’s performance in his music video for “Rock Me Tonite” and

Matthew Perry’s embodiment of Friends’ character Chandler Bing.

121 CHAPTER V

ACT ONE, SCENE TWO

BE A MAN: SWAYZE’S BEEFCAKE, SQUIER’S FALL FROM GRACE, BING’S HOMOPHOBIA, AND THE LONELY ISLAND’S PARODY

But First, Let’s Talk About the 1980s: (Straight) White (Dancing) Masculinity: Patrick Swayze, Saturday Night Live, and the Female Gaze

SNL aired the sketch “Chippendales Audition” on October 27, 1990. Actor and professional dancer Patrick Swayze hosted the episode during his peak in popularity in

Hollywood cemented after the sleeper hit dance film three years prior, Dirty Dancing

(Ardolino 1987). By casting him as a fictional erotic dancer auditioning for

Chippendales, the first all-male stripping known for its striptease routines and its signature of black bowtie and white shirt cuffs worn on a bare torso over black pants (Wikipedia.org 2018), this sketch parodied the hypermasculine physique

Swayze came to be known for, an archetype thriving on Hollywood screens in the 1980s.

In the sketch a judges panel consisting of two men and one woman watch Patrick Swayze and ’s characters audition in order to hopefully be cast as one of the troupe’s featured strippers (Saturday Night Live 1990).

The two men step on stage in identical outfits: sleeveless white tuxedo tucked into black tuxedo pants, white cuffs with black , and black bowties. The initial comic thrust reveals itself in the comparison of these two male figures’ body types:

Swayze’s toned muscular physique next to Farley’s soft, overweight form enhanced by

122 Farley’s off-kilter bowtie. As the two men begin to hip thrust and fist pump their arms, the Canadian rock band ’s rock anthem “Working for the Weekend” (1981) sets the comic backdrop for the sketch.

The two men turn their backs to face the judges while they roll their shoulders back and rotate their hips in seductive circles. Swayze’s orbit is tight and controlled while

Farley’s is loose and wide. The two men turn to face the judges in profile as they flex their biceps in a high lunge. As they turn to face the stage, Farley’s shirt has popped open, provoking laughter from the studio audience. The joke is two-fold: not only has

Farley’s shirt popped open assumedly due to Farley’s size (rather than due to his bulging pectoral muscles), but the reveal also depicts the lack of muscularity in Farley rather than the expected bodybuilder chest meant to elicit desire from the target female audience.

The two men strut downstage as Swayze strips to reveal his muscular hairless chest while he rubs his shirt between his legs, tucks his pelvis forward and back, gropes his legs, and arches his back. Farley glances at Swayze, removing his shirt as well in the air of competition, further revealing the comic difference between their physiques as he mirrors

Swayze’s moves with an exaggerated concentrated expression, rubbing his hands all over his hairy and flabby chest. Again, only Farley’s performance causes the studio audience to erupt in laughter. The two dancers continue to attempt to outdo each other in this vein as they gyrate, spin, and flex, Swayze offering the audience exaggerated sex appeal as

Farley represents Swayze’s comic antithesis.

The sketch ends with the judge explaining, that while Farley’s dancing was

“great” and his presentation “sexy,” Swayze’s body was “much, much better . . . it’s just

123 that, at Chippendales, our dancers have traditionally had that lean, muscular, healthy physique . . . whereas yours is, well, fat and flabby” (Saturday Night Live 1990). As the judge continues to explain they considered casting Farley to appease Chippendales’

“heavier” female audience members, the song “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” (Medley and Warnes 1987), famous for Swayze’s Dirty Dancing dance with his co-star

Jennifer Grey, plays in the background accompanied by the voiceover of Swayze’s character pondering what has just occurred during the judging portion of the audition:

“Even as I stood there listening to them explain why they’d chosen me, I still couldn’t believe it. . . . I never saw Barney [the character played by Farley] again but I would never forget how, for one moment, he brought out the best in me. That was the time of my life” (Saturday Night Live 1990).

I sense this SNL sketch epitomizes a crucial moment for the White Man Dance trope, specifically in its early evolution in the 1980s. During this time period, Swayze came to popularity while Hollywood was elevating the objectified muscular White man archetype. As film and queer theorist Richard Dyer points out in his text White:

Until the 1980s, it was rare to see a white man semi-naked in popular . The art gallery, sports and pornography offered socially sanctioned or cordoned- off images, but the cinema, the major visual narrative form of the twentieth century, only did so in particular cases. (1997, 146)

Dyer continues his argument by discussing how previously American popular culture imaged non-White bodies in this hypermasculine and muscular , witnessed in such genres as the Western, the plantation drama, and the jungle adventure film. Further, as a point of comparison for this study, Dyer also cites the non-White bodies who signify the

124 queer dance form of voguing in their supporting performance of White female pop star

Madonna’s music video for her hit song “.”

Dyer argues the problem in depicting a naked White masculine body is that “[A] naked body is a vulnerable body. This is so in the most fundamental sense—the bare body has no protection from the elements—but also in a social sense. Clothes are bearers of prestige, notably of wealth, status and class: to be without them is to lose prestige”

(1997, 146). However, as Dyer continues, the rise of bodybuilding in the latter half of the twentieth century also gave rise to the image of the well-built White male physique in

Hollywood, e.g., Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as action heroes in popular American films such as Rambo and . In the following, Dyer demonstrates how the shift from bare bodies as lower caste in the early twentieth century to bare bodies as a luxury of the higher class emerged by the late 1980s:

Bodybuilding in popular culture articulates white masculinity. The body shapes it cultivates and the way it presents them draw on a number of white traditions. First, bodybuilding makes reference to classical—that is, ancient Greek and Roman—art. . . . Second, bodybuilding now more often invokes a US, and a fortiori Californian, lifestyle, with a characteristic emphasis on ideas of health, energy and naturalness. . . . Equally, many of the properties of the built body carry connotations of whiteness: it is ideal, hard, achieved, wealthy, hairless and tanned. . . . Moreover, a hard, contoured body does not look like it runs the risk of being merged into other bodies. A sense of separation and boundedness is important to the white male ego. . . . Only a hard, visibly bounded body can resist being submerged into the horror of femininity and non-whiteness. The built body is an achieved body, worked at, planned, suffered for. . . . The built body is a wealthy body. It is well fed and enormous amounts of leisure time have been devoted to it. (1997, 148-155)

Therefore, one can surmise Swayze’s rise in popularity via a dance film masculinized the art form for a mass audience, specifically one that had earlier associated dance with femininity. By the mid-1980s, then, Swayze embodied the hypermasculine physique of

125 the bodybuilder hero archetype already made popular by the Stallone and

Schwarzenegger ideal. The Swayze persona also provided female viewers with a romantic ideal, the White heartthrob beefcake who could also dance.

The incorporation of women’s desires into the movie industry box office can also be seen as disrupting the perception that cinema was constructed according to the sole desires of the male gaze. The term “male gaze” entered film criticism mainly through the writings of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema,” originally published in 1975. In this canonical text, Mulvey argues that classical Hollywood cinema, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, was structured to privilege the male as the expected spectator and the woman as the object of that spectator. In her view, “[W]oman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfield to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire” (1999, 837). However, as noted by box office sales, Hollywood would see a shift in the gender of the gaze as the male beefcake in the

1980s began to appear on the screen. Although Swayze’s popularity in Dirty Dancing seemed largely based on a female viewer originally, his image as embodying a feminized masculinity also illustrates how ideas around gender were shifting at this time23.

The following analyses will address the ways in which dance and popular cultural collided with notions of heterosexuality and masculinity to create new questions

23 Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln’s collection, The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture (2013), addresses Swayze’s brand of bad boy masculinity, whereas Mark D. Hawthorne’s Making It Ours: Queering the Canon (1998) addresses the cross-gender and cross-sexual appeal of Swayze, particularly regarding his roles in such films as the homoerotic buddy action film Point Break and the drag film To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar.

126 with regards to the definition of the White dancing male. As the aforementioned

Chippendales sketch playing upon Swayze’s 1980s beefcake masculinity archetype suggests, the White Man Can’t Dance trope is largely constructed as a parody set against images of White male dancers accepted as mainstream movers such as Patrick Swayze. It is through this contrast the White Man Can’t Dance trope was able to ultimately ground itself. However, as this section will address regarding White male musician Billy Squier and White male comedic actor Matthew Perry, the White Man Dance, especially within the 1980s and 1990s, illustrated a struggle with dance movement and its possible problematic mainstream association with homosexual identification. The following pages will show the ways in which dance was employed to illustrate a liminal space between heteronormativity and homoeroticism.

In this section, which includes analyses of movement sequences featuring Billy

Squier and Matthew Perry (as Friends’ Chandler Bing), dance is used as a marker to question each man’s position within White masculinity. For Billy Squier, the ways in which his dancing served to destabilize his position in White masculinity proved possibly detrimental to his actual career. On the other hand, Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing was a fictional depiction; however, it was one with which his tenuous grasp on heterosexuality and masculinity was affirmed through his effete victory dances throughout the show, among numerous other quips suggested by Bing, his friends, and romantic partners regarding his possible closeted homosexuality. In the previous section, Act One, Scene

One, the White men of focus were in essence lovable everymen whose physical comedy as it intersected with dance movement embodied something of the generic White male.

127 On the contrary, the White masculinity of the men in this section is instead questioned and mocked utilizing the lens of dance movement. It is the effeminate and effete nature of the dancing itself that causes the audiences of Squier and Chandler Bing to question these movers’ holds on heterosexual masculinity.

Billy Squier and “Rock Me Tonite”: How a Video Became the Scapegoat for a Rock Musician’s Career

The video opens revealing a bed draped with pink satin pillows and bedding as

the song begins to play in the background. Squier lies on his back beneath the

covers while snapping his fingers, exposing his hairless bare chest as he looks up

towards the ceiling. Slowly rising to a seated position, his wavy hair is tousled as

if he’s just gotten up from a nap. The camera seductively fades from a close-up of

his upper torso to a shot of Squier’s fists tightening the drawstring of his white

. He slowly puts on a ripped white tank top and begins snapping his

fingers. Squier sashays as he continues snapping, lightly thrusting his pelvis and

dancing towards his own reflection in the mirror. The mirror is actually an

elevator opening to reveal a pink interior. He whips around to face the camera as

he sings and dances. As he makes his way to the floor Squier continues to crawl

forward using his elbows. He rolls onto his back as he continues to dance to the

song, his knees raised, his head resting on its side on the floor, his elbows bent

above his shoulders. The camera pans out to a full body shot as he raises his hips

towards the ceiling. The camera cuts to Squier on his knees as he shimmies his

shoulders and swings a piece of light clothing he holds in his hands around and

around in front of him to the beat of the music. The camera cuts to a close-up of

128 Squier’s face singing emphatically with his eyes closed as the image of him

tossing the clothing to the side fades out. The camera pans out to reveal Squier

prancing and skipping around his apartment. He continues skipping and dancing,

swinging his arms in circles on both sides of his body. Squier continues to skip

and fingersnap with the addition of a light pink tank top draped over his white

shirt. He continues to dance around the apartment in the same manner, making

his way to the top of the bed, continuing to dance. Squier slides onto his stomach

on the bed just in time for a lyrical passage in the song. He sings this passage

sitting on the floor, his elbow leaning against the bed, his head slowly falling back

to the mattress as he sings. The video closes with Squier strapping on an electric

guitar and joining his band on a soundstage as he finishes performing the song as

a musician would in a live concert.

The story behind the making and subsequent backlash of the video for Billy

Squier’s song “Rock Me Tonite” (2008), which originally aired on MTV in 1984, has become a legend in and of itself. An extensive Wikipedia entry on the song takes great lengths to describe the long sordid history of the making of the video, including the varying participants’ views on what went so terribly wrong (2018). Ultimately, the story reads a bit like a he said/he said argument with each player in the story blaming another person for the negative impact of the video on Billy Squier’s popularity. In Rob

Tannenbaum and Craig Marks’s oral history I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, an entire chapter is devoted to the story behind what is often considered the worst music video ever made (2012).

129 The chapter in Tannenbaum and Marks’s oral history offers a number of different accounts of the aftermath of the video. The initial concept for the video came from Squier himself:

I had an idea for the video, based on the ritual of going to a concert. If we admit it, when we’re ready to go out, we’re checking out clothes and our hair. So I wanted to show me doing that in my apartment, then cut back and forth with kids getting ready to go to a Billy Squier concert and sneaking out of the house. In the last chorus, they get to where they’re going, I get to where I’m going, we’re all in it together. (2012, 216)

It was in the visualization of this concept things went awry. Kenny Ortega, who served as final director and choreographer for the video—he was the third director to attach himself to the project—suggested Squier perform moves he used in his live performances.

Initially, Ortega imagined the video’s choreography might reference Tom Cruise’s air guitar dance in the film Risky Business. Squier claimed he preferred an aesthetic closer to

American Gigolo in terms of “grainy textures, somber colors” (2012, 218). In the oral history, Squier’s interview directly accuses Ortega for the failure of Squier’s career based on the aesthetic choices employed in the video: “I come to the set and see all these pastel colors, a comic-book city backdrop, smoke machines, a bed with satin sheets. . . . I didn’t like the sheets, but I trusted the guy. I mean, look, Kenny is gay. And this is the way he saw me. He abused my trust, I really feel that. He did not do what he said he would do”

(2012, 218).

According to others, however, Squier agreed with the visualization of the video until the video received criticism. The lead guitarist for the rock band Def Leppard, the band which opened for Billy Squier’s 1983 tour, declared: “Squier learned the hard way that rock singers shouldn’t skip through their bedroom, ripping their shirts off. That’s in

130 the first chapter of the rock handbook. You should know that straight off the bat” (216).

Pete Angelus, manager for Led Zeppelin, claims Squier is responsible: “Let me stop you right there. What could the director have said? ‘You’re going to dance around like an idiot and don’t worry, we’ll cut around it?’ There’s no finger-pointing in that regard, Mr.

Squier. I don’t care if the director was lying dead on the floor, you shouldn’t have put on a fucking pink T-shirt and danced around like that” (2012, 218). Arnold Steifel, former manager of and Prince, retorted: “But did Billy not notice the pastel satin sheets? I mean, I don’t know that ever did such a gay video. . . . It’s more than swishy. He was jumping on beds and ripping off his shirt. He’s the world’s most horrible dancer” (2012, 218-219). Mick Kleber, an executive at Squier’s label, Capitol

Records, addresses the way the label initially responded to the video when it arrived, comments which address the ways in which homophobia and ideas of masculinity were pejoratively read into the video: “When the rough cut arrived at Capitol, the immediate consensus was Billy’s performance was disturbingly effeminate. ‘Is this supposed to be funny?’ ‘Is Billy okay with this? He looks totally gay.’ ‘A pink shirt? What was he thinking?’ ‘It wouldn’t be so bad except for all the skipping’” (2012, 219). Finally, the chapter includes Squier’s own assessment of how the video could be connected to

Squier’s ultimate demise as a rock musician, contextualized by a masculine reading of the video itself:

When I saw the video, my jaw dropped. It was diabolical. I looked at it and went, “What the fuck is this?” I remember a guy from the record company saying, “Don’t worry about it, the record’s a smash.” I wanted to believe it would be okay. My girlfriend said something like, “This is gonna ruin you.” This is where I’ll take responsibility. I could have stopped it. . . . The video misrepresents who I am as an artist. I was a good-looking, sexy guy. That certainly didn’t hurt in

131 promoting my music. But in this video I’m kind of a pretty boy. And I’m preening around a room. People said, “He’s gay.” Or, “He’s on drugs.” It was traumatizing to me. I mean, I had nothing against gays. I have a lot of gay friends. But like it or not, it was much more of a sticky issue then. . . . The tour before, I was selling out arenas faster than Sinatra, and as soon as that video came out I was playing to half houses. I went from 15,000 and 20,000 people a night to 10,000 people. Everything I’d worked for my whole life was crumbling, and I couldn’t stop it. How can a four-minute video do that? Okay, it sucked. So? Kenny Ortega didn’t get hurt by this; I did. That’s ironic. Nobody said, “I’m not gonna hire him, look what he did to Billy Squier!” He just moved on. The only person who got hurt by it was me. If you want to get really dramatic, you could say the guy crippled me. (2012, 219-220)

Although Squier has often accused Ortega in various interviews of being responsible for ruining his career, Ortega responded to Squier’s attacks by refuting responsibility: “If anything I tried to toughen the image he was projecting. Let there be no doubt, ‘Rock Me

Tonite’ was a Billy Squier video in every sense. If it has damaged his career, he has no one to blame but himself” (Denisoff 1987, 160).

What these varied and lengthy accounts of the video expose harkens back to

Eddie Murphy’s White Man Dance sketch and the fragile position of masculine performance during the early 1980s. The chapter in MTV’s oral history addressing the infamous video includes almost exclusively all-male interpretations of the video and its aftermath. The text does include one quip by Roberta Cruger, the director of Talent

Relations at MTV, who states: “It was a pretty bad video. In fact, it was a very bad video.

At MTV, we all said, ‘Oh my god, what were they thinking?’” (2012, 219). Further, all of the voices critiquing the video in the text except for Kenny Ortega (he identifies publicly as a gay man and is of Spanish descent) and Cruger identify as straight White men.

Additionally, the oral history also makes clear that in its formative years, MTV’s original target audience was young straight White men between the ages of eighteen to twenty-

132 five. Read in this context, the video demonstrates the demands on American masculinity at the time and how easily a White male performer’s masculinity and heterosexuality could be questioned. Situated within the responses to the video, the critiques of the video also demonstrate what signifiers can be read as signs of effeminization closely linked to markers of homosexual identity.

Squier’s video offers an important example of a White male dancing in which his ability to dance is not in question as much as what his style of dancing (as well as other factors in the film) signifies in terms of his position within heterosexual masculinity. In the case of America’s ideological expectation for White men, one needs only to be

“masculine enough.” However, because Squier’s video was released during the AIDS crisis and early in the differing unstable depictions of masculinity in American popular culture, this video seemed to have a devastating effect on Squier’s target audience, young straight White men from the ages of eighteen to twenty-four.

“Rock Me Tonite”: An Analysis

The video relies upon gestures and other signifiers of femininity read as possible homosexual symbols after the video’s release. For example, the video is filmed in soft tones of blue and pink. The color pink remains a signature color in the film to include

Squier’s shirt in the second half of the video as well as the guitar Squier ultimately uses to perform the song at the end of the video. Although the color pink has been assumed to signify femininity in a more contemporaneous embodiment, it was not always so. In fact, according to Michael Kimmel in his Manhood in America: A Cultural History, the color pink was coded in the early twentieth century as masculine. Kimmel states:

133 A 1918 editorial entitled “Pink or Blue?” in the magazine The Infants’ Department explained: “ . . . there has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” (2012, 117)

Although boys and girls were dressed in identical color schemes prior to the 1880s, boys were dressed in pink because they were felt to be “manly colors, indicating strength and determination” (2012, 117). Kimmel admits there remains a mystery surrounding the precise historical moment the gendered relationship to pink shifted. Regardless of how the color was first associated in terms of gender, by the late twentieth century pink was indeed associated with femininity. The use of the color pink in a music video featuring a rock musician, then, was one of the ways in which the video could be seen as troubling

Squier’s perceived relationship to gender and sexual identity.

According to Jo B. Paoletti’s extensive study on the color-coding of gender in

America, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, the rise of feminism ultimately led to the shift of associating pink with girls in the late 1970s and early 1980s:

In 1978, the objective was to empower girls by eliminating every last vestige of “traditional” femininity from their environment. . . . Since the 1980s, not only has pink become a strongly feminine color (probably because the women’s movement connected it with traditional girliness so successfully), but it has reached the level of imperative in the age group of three to seven. (2012, 86-94)

These two studies on the early gender coding of pink in America’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveal the somewhat arbitrary construction of masculine signifiers. In some ways, the color pink being associated with femininity at this time in American culture intersected with the release of Squier’s video at the exact right moment to create distrust in the singer’s performance of masculinity.

134 Another signifier of effeminacy repeatedly mentioned in the critiques of the video is Squier’s repetitive skipping in his performance. According to the text Changing Play:

Play, Media and Commercial Culture from the 1950s to the Present Day, “[T]here is historical evidence for both boys and girls participating in skipping . . . although the popular perception today, as in the mid-twentieth century, is that it is the province of girls” (Marsh and Bishop 2014, 45). Further, Herb Goldberg’s 1976 manual on messages boys receive regarding how one can avoid being effeminate, The Hazards of Being Male:

Surviving the of Masculine Privilege, states in no uncertain terms what message a boy will receive if he performs an action resembling skipping rope: “As a boy the messages he was given were powerful and clear. Only sissies or ‘fags’ play with girls.

Playing house, cooking, sewing, dressing a doll, or skipping rope would expose him to all kinds of taunts, and only the strongest could survive and continue doing so openly” (65).

The critics of the video as established earlier further reinforce this expectation of masculinity, which largely infer a man should not expect to be respected (or considered straight) if he displays himself skipping in his room.

A final signifier helping to erode Squier’s possible masculinity is the symbol of satin marked in the sheets and pillows he rolls around with during the opening shot and throughout the video. Similar to the signifiers of skipping and adorning himself with the color pink, satin was a fabric gradually becoming signified as a stereotype denoting effeminacy and homosexuality. In the nineteenth century, as expressed in Kimmel’s history of masculinity, luxurious fabrics such as silk and satin were associated with the masculine dandy, whose wealth affirmed his masculinity. However, when the twentieth

135 century gave rise to the “Self-Made Man,” which transformed the wealthy dandy into the hardworking laborer, the fabrics began to signify something different altogether (2012).

As Byrne Fone declares in Homophobia: A History during his discussion of European images of homophobia, “luxurious fabrics” such as satin “leave little room for doubt”

(2001, 244). Certainly, the more contemporary transformation of current masculine images such as the metrosexual or the urban dandy allows for more androgynous images of masculinity than Squier was able to rely upon during a time period in which the masculine archetype was particularly fragile, exacerbated by the American public negotiating the gay male image in the American public for the first time in any substantial way.

In the case of Squier, it is very possible that being associated with a dance video in which the subject was questioned for his effeminacy and homosexuality would thus cause a viewer’s own masculinity and heterosexuality to be questioned by mere association. As examples in future decades will demonstrate, this trope will add on to this troubling image via the use of comedy, intentionally dancing badly (or effeminately) in order to comment on the very rigidity of masculinity within mainstream popular culture

Squier’s video appears to represent. The next section focusing on Matthew Perry’s embodiment of the fictional character Chandler Bing from the 1990s hit television show

Friends will explore the ways in which a similar type of unstable masculinity is illustrated exactly a decade after the release of Squier’s infamous music video.

136 The One with the Homophobia: Chandler Bing

This section will give a theoretical reading of the recurring victory dance the character Chandler Bing performs on the NBC television 1990s sitcom Friends, contextualized by the ways in which Chandler’s sexuality and/or masculinity is questioned or mocked throughout the show’s series. I will argue that one way in which

Chandler’s character can be read is as abject, and the repeated use of Chandler’s victory dance, in association with his gender and sexuality repudiation, concretizes the dance itself as a marker for his abjection.

The American sociologist C.J. Pascoe grounds her eighteen-month study of masculinity in a racially-diverse working-class high school, Dude, You’re a Fag:

Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, in a Butlerian24 framework with regards to gender and homosexual construction. According to Pascoe,

Butler argues that gendered beings are created through processes of repeated invocation and repudiation. People constantly reference or invoke a gendered norm, thus making the norm seem like a timeless truth. Similarly, people continually repudiate a “constitutive outside” (Butler 1993, 3) in which is contained is cast out of a socially recognizable gender category. . . . Gender, in this sense, is “constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.” (2007, 14)

Relying upon this theory of the abject position in relation to the repetitive construction of gender norms, Pascoe asserts the “‘fag’ position is an ‘abject’ position and, as such, is a

‘threatening specter’” (2007, 14-15). Based on a series of interviews and observations

24 Gender studies scholar Judith Butler, who was discussed at length in the introduction of this dissertation, questions the role performance plays in disrupting or reinforcing gender norms.

137 Pascoe conducted with teenage American boys, Pascoe concluded boys called one another “fag” not necessarily to call them out as homosexual, but to mark them as unmasculine.

Chandler Bing’s victory dance on Friends has gradually developed a - worthy status in American popular culture. Friends’ fans have created mash-up compilations of Chandler dancing to various musical selections: videos of Chandler Bing dancing in random situations—even, for example, the White House; and a tutorial video to learn “How To Dance Like Chandler” (Freid 2016). However, while fans create their own gifs of Chandler Bing dancing in self-mockery, cultural media writers have recently published indictments of Friends’ use of homophobia and transphobia as punchlines, often evoked through Chandler’s character. These critical texts include Miles Behn’s

“The Gender Spectrum and Friends: How America’s Favorite Sitcom Screwed Up an

Entire Generation” (2014), Claire Marchon’s “Why I Will Not Be Binge-Watching

‘Friends:’ Offensive Homophobic and Transphobic Jokes” (2015), and Joe Reid’s

“Today in TV History: ‘Friends’ Introduced Kathleen Turner as Chandler’s Dad and It

Was Problematic AF” (2017). For a slightly different read on Chandler, however,

Postscript Productions’ “FRIENDS Analysis: Chandler Bing’s Soulmate is Kathy” offers a different analysis on Chandler’s arguably homophobic remarks, one considering

Chandler as a child of two narcissistic parents and therefore argues it is through this traumatized position (particularly regarding the father who is at times characterized as a queer figure and at others as transgender) one should read Chandler’s liminal position of sexuality (doz 2015). In this vein, one can also read Chandler’s character as assumed gay

138 and effeminate but as actually having adopted behavior from his father’s complex gender and sexual identity throughout Chandler’s formative years (doz 2015).

In order to give a reading of Chandler’s victory dance as it occurs in three different episodes, I find it first necessary to offer a brief introduction of Chandler Bing’s character throughout the series. The television sitcom Friends ran on NBC primetime for

236 episodes over ten seasons from 1994 to 2004 (Crane and Kaufmann). The show depicted five characters and their intersecting friendships and relationships with one another as well as with others during their twenties living in New York City. Chandler

Bing represents the character of the show, often referring directly to or relying on his sense of humor to diffuse uncomfortable situations. Chandler is depicted as the most insecure character on the show with a serial inability to commit in his relationships with women for most of the show’s duration. His possible homosexuality and his inability to affirm his masculinity is a recurring theme with Chandler’s character, revealed via other characters’ mockery of him as well as his own self-mockery.

The following represent examples that occur throughout the show addressing his possible homosexuality or effeminization. In season two, Chandler responds to his roommate Joey’s moving out of the apartment like a break-up (Marshall 2007, 89). In season four, Chandler mocks himself for not going to the gym because he was “proud of his flabby gut and saggy man breasts” (Marshall 2007, 90). In season five, when Joey accepts a call for Chandler that he left an eyelash curler at a hotel room he secretly occupied with their mutual friend Monica, Chandler immediately confesses the eyelash curler was for him. Joey responds by saying he assumed it was a woman he had hooked

139 up with, to which Chandler responds by saying that would have made much more sense.

This interaction leads Joey to finally ask whether or not Chandler went on a gay cruise, making it clear that this was much more believable than his secret affair with a woman

(DeVally 1998). In season seven, Ross, Monica’s brother and Chandler’s college roommate, tells Monica (Chandler’s girlfriend) that once in Atlantic City Chandler accidentally “kissed a guy.” Chandler defends himself by exclaiming “[I]n my defense, it was dark and he was a very pretty guy!” (Friends 2000). In season eight, Chandler admits he “enjoyed taking baths” (Marshall 2007, 90). Chandler also confesses to behavior clearly marked as feminine throughout the show, such as in season eight when he admits to “own[ing] two copies of the Annie soundtrack” and being rejected from violent team sports, instead associating with such traditionally non-masculine athletic activities as gymnastics and figure skating when he was young (Marshall 2007, 90).

However, the most significant ideological marking of Chandler as effeminate or possibly gay occurs when the show introduces the queer narrative of Chandler’s father.

According to Claire Marchon, Charles Bing was depicted as “a gay man, a performing drag queen, a transwoman, and most importantly the butt of every joke. The writing used every available stereotype of the 90’s to scrape together a character with no depth who could be used mainly for laughs and riddle Chandler with ‘daddy-issues’” (2015). The

“Daddy” character was first introduced in season five, episode eight. Relying heavily on flashbacks, Chandler expresses a difficulty celebrating Thanksgiving because he associates it with the moment in his childhood when his parents inform him they are getting divorced because his father had an affair with the houseboy. When the father

140 makes his first appearance on the show two seasons later, the show conflates homosexual, drag queen, and transgender identity and performance (Bright 1998).

Chandler’s dad first appears on the show on season seven, episode twenty-two, after Monica asks Chandler why he did not invite his father to their wedding.

Embarrassed, Chandler discloses that his father is a Las Vegas drag queen. Even though

Monica still feels “he” should be invited, Chandler quips that “[N]obody’s going to be staring at the bride when the father of the groom is wearing a backless ,” implying a drag queen would cross-dress in public, conflating a drag queen’s performance with cross-dressing. This humor is further cemented by Kathleen Turner being cast in the father’s role, a cis woman known for her husky voice, who Chandler sarcastically greets by exclaiming, “[H]i, Daddy!” when Chandler and Monica approach the father after attending her drag performance (Bright 2001). Finally, in the next episode, “The One with Chandler and Monica’s Wedding: Part 1,” Chandler’s father attends the wedding in women’s clothes and makeup, implying a transgender identity for the character. Despite this, the episode consists of constant references to the character with a male pronoun, even including a comic reference of his penis from the clearly resentful mother and ex- wife. At one point during the episode, Rachel, one of Chandler and Monica’s friends, confuses Chandler’s father with another woman (Bright 2001). The narrative of

Chandler’s father, both in the construction of his character and Chandler’s constant feminizing of him in narrative retellings, seems to me a way to contextualize the struggle

Chandler expresses around his non-normative mode of masculinity and the occasional subtext regarding Chandler’s own sexuality.

141 Chandler’s Victory Dance: An Analysis

Based on the ideological signification of Chandler’s character, the dance Chandler performs in five different episodes consequently occupies a similar ideological space regarding its position involving repetitive gender norms. The dance is just another example of how the repetitive repudiation of gender behavior constructs gender identity.

With slight variations, Chandler performs the same dance move in each occurrence.

Hopping lightly from one foot to the other with his feet parallel and placed slightly apart,

Chandler shakes each hand held in fists with his arms bent close to his chest outwards as though beating maracas. His mouth is often slightly open with a self-mocking look on his face. Additionally, the use of the dance as a comic means is further indicated by the live studio audience, which laughs uproariously every time Chandler performs this brief dance (Friends 1994-2004).

The first time Chandler performs the dance is on season four, episode twenty.

Rachel and Chandler discuss their friend Ross’s upcoming wedding in Chandler’s apartment. Chandler states unequivocally he does not dance at weddings. When Rachel asks him why, Chandler explains: “Weddings are a great place to meet women. And when I dance, I look like this.” He then proceeds to demonstrate his dancing for her.

Dressed in a suit, Chandler exaggerates his moves. The camera begins by showing

Chandler’s dance from the waist up and then widens out to include Rachel’s unimpressed knowing reaction to Chandler’s moves (Friends 1998). This initial depiction of the dance affirms his position in the show as the unmasculine buffoon, not only because Rachel is clearly neither impressed by his dancing nor shocked by its display (combined with the

142 studio audience’s guffawing heard in the background), but especially in how the dance scene concludes. The camera does not show Chandler’s dance in a full body shot until his oldest friend Ross walks into the apartment from behind Chandler. Chandler continues to dance, although clearly aware another man is now witnessing his embarrassing display.

Chandler slows to a stop, flinging his head around in an effeminate hair-whipping gesture to see the person standing behind him. Ross gives him a bro nod and hello. The characters move on. The dance is just another element reinforcing my reading of

Chandler’s position in the show as abject, as well as a homophobic and unmasculine punchline to garner laughs.

In two back-to-back episodes in the following season, the dance is employed to contextualize the submissive role Chandler occupies in his final romantic relationship in the show with his best friend Ross’s sister Monica. In both episodes, Chandler and

Monica navigate the early stages of an adult romantic relationship they initially keep secret from the rest of the friends. In season five, episode three, Chandler struggles with commitment, stating when Monica pushes for a definition of the status of their relationship that the two of them are “goofing around.” Testing Chandler in response,

Monica begins to court a male nurse at the hospital where their friend Phoebe is giving birth. This threat to their relationship leads Chandler to have a serious conversation with

Monica regarding their commitment status, thus cementing their dynamic as a couple.

Chandler creates a new definition for his term, this time with marked sensitivity: “The technical definition is two friends who care a lot about each other and have amazing sex and just want to spend more time together.” He then admits comically he is “so bad at

143 this.” Monica concedes, clearly satisfied by his response, saying that she will call off her date with the male nurse (Friends 1998). This interaction establishes Chandler’s role in the relationship as both sensitive, thus addressing his effeminization in the show’s series, but also masculine (as their sexual compatibility is referenced repeatedly and will be discussed in the following paragraphs).

However, this scene also establishes Monica’s masculine role regarding policing

Chandler’s femininity as well. After Monica tells Chandler that she will cancel her date with the male nurse, Chandler awkwardly attempts to continue his apology until Monica scolds him, saying, “[K]now when to stop” (Friends 1998). Chandler immediately succumbs to her, bringing back the familiar humor of his character’s unmasculine behavior. This continues into the final moment of the scene. As Monica walks away,

Chandler begins to stealthily perform his victory dance in silence, gritting his teeth and raising his eyebrows in self-mocking comedy. However, Monica again polices his feminine and overly eager behavior in the following directive without even needing to look behind her to verify he is executing the dance: “Don’t do the dance” (Friends 1998).

Chandler immediately submits to her in acquiescence.

Given that Monica commands Chandler not to do the dance, which she does repeatedly throughout their relationship, it is implied the dance is untoward behavior for a

White male. Despite this, the dance, as well as the other feminine behaviors Chandler performs throughout their relationship, never becomes reasons for Monica to fully reject

Chandler, which is an interesting twist on gendered behavior. As a side note, it could be argued that one of the ways in which Monica and Chandler form a connection is that they

144 both represent abject characters—Chandler in his expression of masculinity and Monica in her insecurities as possessing obsessive compulsive tendencies as well as being shamed by the other characters for her childhood and teen obesity, which is depicted as a series of flashbacks throughout the show (Friends 1994-2004).

In the following episode, Chandler performs the dance in rebellion to Monica’s dominant position in the relationship. On season five, episode four, Rachel clearly knows

Monica is involved with a man; however, Monica will not reveal his identity. As Monica,

Rachel, and Chandler drink coffee together at their favorite café, Rachel expresses a great desire to know the identity of the mystery lover who, according to Monica, is the “best sex [she’s] ever had” (Friends 1998). Chandler is absolutely gleeful without restraint at this admission, challenging the masculine archetype that a man firmly within his position of hegemonic masculinity plays it cool.

In a following scene, Chandler sits with the three female leads of the show, asking

Monica more questions about her mystery lover. Chandler knows Monica cannot scold him in front of her friends without revealing he is her lover. Rebelling from her maternal domineering nature, he performs the dance in one of its most ostentatious expressions in the show’s run. Expressing his unfettered reaction to being the best sex Monica has ever had, Chandler exclaims, “I mean if this guy was me, and it’s me who’d learned it was me who was the best you’d ever had, I’d be like this,” and then proceeds to jump on the coffee table to perform his dance.

Unlike the other occurrences of this dance, the camera remains on Chandler in a full-body shot for the entirety of his performance. He consciously overperforms the move

145 to take control over Monica, swishing his hips and pumping one foot and then the other, his arms moving outwards in dramatic motions. In this employment of his dance move,

Monica is instead the mocked subject in an about-face, trying not to look at his dancing for what it reminds her of her uncomfortable exposure. The scene ends when Monica threatens to withhold sex from Chandler in private, therefore forcing Chandler to eat his words. Monica then mocks him by imitating his dance back to him (Friends 1998)25. In this moment Chandler’s liminality between fool and romantic object, effete buffoon and masculine partner, becomes clearer. His being sexually superior to Monica’s other lovers

(even surpassing Monica’s father’s colleague Richard, performed by heteronormative hunk Tom Selleck) reinforces his masculinity while the dance he performs keeps

Chandler’s effeminization clearly intact.

Finally, in season eight, episode one, Chandler dances at the reception of his wedding with Monica (Friends 2001). However, this particular part of the scene got cut from the public release of the episode but is now available on YouTube (Bright 2011). In the uncut version, Monica wants to dance with Chandler, but his shoes are too slippery for the dance floor. Incredibly uncomfortable and frustrated, he tells Monica he took dance lessons with her because he did not want her “to be embarrassed to be seen on the dance floor with some clumsy idiot” (Friends 2001). This admission is included in the final take of the episode and could be seen as representing the feeling of traditional White

25 This moment is even more ironic when one recalls the dance performed by Alfonso Ribeiro to Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is influenced by Courtney Cox’s (who performs the role of Monica in Friends) “White” dancing in ’s Dancing in the Dark music video combined with the movements performed by Eddie Murphy in his White Man Dance sketch (Holmes 2015).

146 American masculinity during the 1990s. In other words, he will perform the awkwardly bad dance for his friends privately but he will not dance in public, especially not during an occasion in which he does not want to embarrass his new bride. Monica convinces him to return to the dance floor, at which point Chandler awkwardly attempts to casually dance.

Monica’s father jokes to Chandler that he is going to have him arrested for

“stealing [his] moves” (Friends 2001). Chandler stops dancing momentarily in response and then continues. Following this moment, Chandler begins to dance with Monica’s mother in a scene that was eventually cut. As the mother tells Chandler he can call her

“Mom,” Chandler begins to dance more confidently until his feet begin to slide uncontrollably on the floor. As Chandler starts to fall, he grabs onto his mother-in-law’s to maintain his balance but ends up ripping her skirt off her body, revealing her and sexy . Similar to how Chandler has sarcastically addressed his father in past episodes, he quips, “[S]orry, Mom” while everyone awkwardly watches, stunned (Bright 2011). Although deleted from the aired episode, this scene further demonstrates how Chandler’s relationship to dance reflects his position as abject in terms of gender and sexuality. Even when Chandler tries to perform the behavior affirming his position as a normative masculine figure such as dance with his new mother-in-law, he still comically fails. When Chandler de- his mother-in-law, it appears it is still Chandler depicted as foolish and emasculated rather than the exposed woman standing next to him. This is made clear by the fact her face stays stern and maternal without the slightest hint of embarrassment while Chandler has an expression of

147 humiliation and emasculation consistent with the other gags involving Chandler throughout the show’s run.

Because of the happenstance method by which the show’s creators incorporate

Chandler Bing’s dance into the overall construction of his character, the White male dancer as awkward, buffoonish, and unmasculine becomes even more cemented as an ideological trope. As read within Pascoe and Butler’s framing, Chandler embodies an abject position of homosexuality and masculinity in ways concretized both via his childhood narrative as well as his adult signification. Because Chandler’s father is vaguely mocked as being gay, a drag queen, and possibly transgender, Chandler’s unmasculine and effeminate behavior as an adult is read with a similar signification.

These two narrative tropes in the show help identify the dance in the same gendered fashion, contributing to a repudiation of Chandler’s masculinity. Just as Billy Squier was rejected for his feminized solo dancing in the video for “Rock Me Tonite,” so too is

Chandler repudiated for his outlandish, comic dance moves, both by him and other female characters such as Monica and Rachel. Thus, this show further contributes to cementing the stereotype that White men can’t dance and those who do are in danger of losing membership within hegemonic masculinity or heteronormative gender modes.

What I find most interesting with regards to the kinds of gendered troubling occurring with 1990s Chandler, particularly as juxtaposed against 1980s Billy Squier, is how Chandler is still given access to the fruits of masculinity (e.g., his relationship with

Monica and other attractive women throughout the show, his status as one of the highest paid characters in the show, and his membership in the friend ensemble) while also

148 struggling to maintain his position within heterosexuality. Squier, on the other hand, a decade prior to Friends, seemed to have been forced into a gender binary made more complicated as the hysteria of homosexuality and the AIDS crisis shifted to a new dimension. The next section will close Act One with an analysis of the work of contemporary comedic trio the Lonely Island who infuse their dances with satire in order to make a comment on the normative modes of hegemonic masculinity.

The Lonely Island and the Creation of a New Internet Evolution

Based on the cult popularity and the pioneering achievements in past and present contemporary American popular culture, the comedic trio the Lonely Island has reached legendary status since the early- to mid-2000s (Ostendorf 2016). Albeit an improvable one, the Lonely Island’s biggest claim to fame is that they were responsible for the creation and popularity of what is referred to by the mainstream American public as the

“viral” video, becoming one of the first mainstream artists to ever post their work solely on a digital platform while YouTube was still in its infancy. Since that beginning, largely due to their foundational work pioneering the SNL digital short and including their five comedy feature-length films, the Lonely Island created a reputation among American popular culture for their use of slapstick, physical humor, and musical comedy. These comedic actions further parodied other American popular cultural figures and texts to ultimately build an incendiary critique addressing the limitations of hegemonic White masculinity.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, the Lonely Island’s most recent film, is a feature-length mockumentary film parodying the musical industry and many of its well-

149 known figures, such as Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, ‘N Sync, and , among others (Schaffer and Taccone 2016). The following analysis will focus on the slapstickian employment of a wardrobe malfunction scene in the film. In this scene the film’s main character, the fictional pop star Conner4Real, inevitably exposes himself on stage during a costume change gone wrong.

I will argue that the film, much in conversation with the Lonely Island’s previous works such as their short videos seen via SNL’s “Digital Short(s)” and the film Hot Rod, uses the slapstick mode to speak not only to the physicality of human life but also to the slapstickian power of losing dignity, a central crisis in the expression of hegemonic masculinity. In the case of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, the laughter at this failed costume change emanates not only from the audience watching the film, but also the fictional audience watching that particular live performance, Conner’s own supporting team (including his nemesis and opening act Hunter the Hunted), and the eyes of the world who witness the act yet again once the video has been shared virally (occurring just moments after its real-time occurrence). According to Alan Dale, “[T]hat’s the appeal of the slapstick outlook, even in life—we have to laugh at the loss of our dignity, which is what makes the constant recurrence of such losses bearable” (2000, 11). This scene develops an intriguing conversation in concert with earlier analyses of White masculinity including Tom Hanks’s relationship with disguise in Bosom Buddies and Big, Billy

Squier’s career fallout with his relationship to clothing and set design in his music video for “Rock Me Tonite,” and even the analysis which opened Act One, Scene Two,

150 featuring the purposefully-comic juxtaposition of Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley disrobing themselves during the Saturday Night Live Chippendales sketch.

In an article published in The International Journal of Screendance, I argued cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard produced foundational theories on the relationship between technology and society, seemingly predicting how technology would ineradicably affect society’s perception of reality. In Benjamin’s influential essay published in 1936 titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he contended:

One of the most significant changes to art in a mechanical age would be the emancipation of art from its aura, closely linked with its authenticity. Political theorist Andrew Robinson explains aura as “an effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time and space.” Once art can be reproduced, it no longer exists in any unique present time or space, and according to Benjamin, loses its aura and authenticity. This is perhaps truer for the music video than for the feature film, because the music video begins its life in a televisual or cyber-enabled viewing experience, whereas the feature film is dominantly experienced in the live environment of the movie theater. (Tsai 2016, 25-26)

Half a century later in Jean Baudrillard’s text Simulation and Simulacra, originally published in 1980, Baudrillard extends Benjamin’s predictions to include a discussion of how technology’s employment of simulation would impact society’s perception of reality: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of the territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1994, 1).

Benjamin and Baudrillard’s intersecting theories can apply to complexities emerging from the music video work of commercial and experimental filmmakers

151 featured on MTV during the early 1990s. As Derek Yates and Jessie Price explain in

Communication Design: Insights from the Creative Industries,

[T]he development of desktop filmmaking tools during the early 1990s provided an outlet for a new generation of filmmakers, who were able to bypass what up until this point had been a long apprenticeship into filmmaking. . . . At this time, new freedoms and economic prosperity had led to the establishment of a global youth culture, and the launch of TV stations like MTV provided an insatiable demand for short-form, visually led films that could accompany the pop music that formed this audience’s staple diet. (2015, 42)

By championing the shortened format of the music video, MTV offered a venue for male filmmakers such as Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, , and to experiment in a hybridized format illustrating the technological transitions of the time.

Caught between film and video, these filmmakers employed various technologies to speak to the simulated reality in which contemporary American society (as well as the rest of the world) now found them. Because the music video, whose primary purpose was to promote the song for which the video was created, lent itself to a visualization of a musical text, the music video format thus also allowed for more abstract moving images and non-traditional narratives. Therefore, this era of the short-form video, combined with technologies made more readily available and accessible to the average consumer, resulted in fans of the network attempting to make videos in kind on their own. This conglomeration of forces inspired one of the most influential voices on the current evolution of the White Man Dance trope: the Lonely Island.

The founding members of the Lonely Island (2001), , Andy

Samberg, and , first met in junior high school in the early 1990s. These three young men are considered members of the MTV Generation in that they came of

152 age during the network’s height in popularity and are representative of the young men who dominated the network’s ratings. Although they experimented with making short videos at home since early in their friendship, they began taking seriously their efforts in making short comic videos often set to music since the late 1990s. They received their first big break in 2005 when SNL hired the Lonely Island to create “Digital Short(s),” pioneering a new type of format on the show (Saturday Night Live 1975-2018).

According to James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales in their oral history titled Live From

New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its

Stars, Writers, and Guests, the Lonely Island initially exposed the mediated quality of their sketches “because, they would later explain, the production quality was so crappy, so much lower than SNL’s big-time network standard, that they felt they had to distinguish it up front, in the labeling. But Lonely Island proved that filmmaking could now be done—segments conceived, shot, edited, scored, and polished—on the family PC or Mac” (2015, 547). The Lonely Island was able to capitalize on its own hybridized journey by making home videos in response to their own fandom of SNL and MTV.

However, they formalized their practice when Andy Samberg brought new techniques to their productions after attending New York University and the University of ,

Santa Cruz in film, which intersected with the shifting technological moment of the late

1990s and early 2000s (Miller and Shales 2015).

The Lonely Island also came to popularity during an important cultural and technological moment with regards to the developing Internet age. According to The

Vulture Jesse David Fox’s article titled “How the Lonely Island Changed the Internet,

153 Comedy, and Especially Internet Comedy”: “Comedy is all about timing. YouTube officially launched on December 15, 2005. The Lonely Island premiered their second

SNL digital short, ‘Lazy Sunday,’ two days later. The site and the group have been irrevocably linked ever since” (2016). An unknown fan of the video “Lazy Sunday,” a gangsta-rap parody celebrating the trio’s day off, posted it on YouTube by the end of the weekend the video originally aired on SNL. By the end of the following week, the video had more than 2 million views on YouTube (Fox 2016).

If Eddie Murphy can be credited as the father of the White Man Dance trope as argued in the beginning of this dissertation, then the Lonely Island could be credited as the founders of the White Man Dance parody, to be further explored in the following analysis. Over their fifteen-year career, the Lonely Island has been awarded an Emmy and a Peabody, three Grammy nominations, and produced two top-ten and two platinum singles. Their videos accumulated 1.7 billion views on YouTube (Fox 2016) and the trio released two feature films. Throughout that time, the Lonely Island was a foundational voice in the contribution of a new kind of comedic voice, one seen as employing the music, narrative film, and short video format in order to comment and at times directly indict contemporary American White masculinity. It would be nearly impossible to include at length discussions of all the pertinent texts in which the Lonely

Island have employed comedic strategies in order to comment upon the dangers of White masculinity, specifically as intersected with movement and dance. However, I will briefly address in the following paragraphs a few of the Lonely Island’s most important

154 contributions when using audiovisual texts to comment upon the trope and the ideologies embedded therein.

Airing on SNL in 2006, “” was performed to a song the Lonely

Island (featuring White male pop star Justin Timberlake) produced which received an

Emmy in 2007. The video was an R&B parody mocking White men’s misogynistic entitlement, particularly as it pertained to their own perceptions of their sexual prowess.

The short incorporates movement and gestures associated with R&B and hip hop

(Saturday Night Live). This mockery was especially targeted as Timberlake has long been associated with employment and appropriation of Black music and dance genres such as soul and hip hop in his solo work, which will be discussed further in Act Two.

The following year, the Lonely Island released their first feature comedy film, Hot

Rod, starring Andy Samberg (Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer 2007). Similarly commenting on White masculinity, the film depicted the trials and tribulations of amateur stuntman Rod. Rod’s abusive stepfather constantly derides and mocks his position within hegemonic masculinity. When Rod discovers his stepfather needs a heart transplant, Rod decides he will perform his most elaborate stunt—an absurd jump over an accumulated length of fifteen school buses—in order to help fund his stepfather’s operation. When his stepfather learns of Rod’s plans, he mocks Rod from his sick bed, to which Rod humorously and angrily declares in response he is still a man. Rod further responds to this exchange by stating he will beat his stepfather to death, holding a fire poker in his hand. I find this moment to be an ironic and interesting comment on the impulsivity of threatened masculinity, given the fact Rod has just previously promised to perform a

155 death-defying stunt in order to save his stepfather’s life. The film takes the humor a step further when Rod breaks the lamp next to his stepfather’s hand instead of causing any injury to the man himself. Seemingly unable to perform in accordance with masculine expectations, Rod chooses to flee to “his quiet place” instead where he fight-dances by himself in the forest.

Rod’s fight-dance scene is an explicit parody of a similar scene in the dance film

Footloose (Ross 1984) where Kevin Bacon’s character angrily dances to the same song used in Hot Rod (Kooky Melons 2016). The scene, which depicts Rod performing many similar movements and tones evoked in Footloose, comically parodies the obvious use of the stunt double in highly choreographed scenes in cinema. However, the real comic thrust of the scene occurs at the end when Hot Rod shifts suddenly from the extended dance sequence using an obvious stunt double back to what is assumed to be Andy

Samberg performing as Rod. After performing a series of virtuosic flips, the audience witnesses Rod trip over a log and fall for an absurd amount of time (approximately a minute of film time) down a cliff, pointing to the gap between the unrealistic physical expectations of a White male dancing in the hazardous environs of a forest.

The Lonely Island explores further this wide gap between how a White male feels obligated to overperform masculine bravado and the more realistic image of White male behavior in the SNL Digital Short titled “” (2009). A hip hop parody of the first official single from Slim Thug’s first Already Platinum, identically named,

“Like a Boss” opens with a corporate superior (performed by Rogen) asking his employee (performed by Andy Samberg) to describe a typical workday. The hip hop

156 parody is composed of Samberg performing his various impressive boss duties in vernacular rap with traditionally-associated hand gestures, celebrated with the hook “Like a boss.” At the beginning of his rap-rant, Samberg brags about tasks such as “talk to corporate,” “lead a workshop,” “direct workflow,” “micromanage,” and “promote synergy” (Saturday Night Live 2009). However, as the song continues, the Lonely

Island’s lyrics reveal the seedy underbelly of masculinity, in which Samberg “hit[s] on

Debra, get[s] rejected, swallow[s] sadness” (Saturday Night Live 2009). Samberg also performs oral sex on another man in a garage, “cries deeply” on a sex line, receives a

“harassment lawsuit,” fails to commit suicide by gun, loses his promotion, and tries to perform oral sex on himself (Saturday Night Live 2009). At the end of the sketch, when

Rogen tries to question Samberg further on his described act of homoeroticism in a kind of mockery of homophobic White men who repress homoerotic desires or even seem to sexually desire themselves vis à vis masturbation, Samberg refuses admission: “Nope.

Naw, that ain’t me” (Saturday Night Live 2009). The sketch employs the Digital Short format to comment on a similar type of failing bravado of corporate White masculinity.

“Like a Boss” furthers a similar type of satire popularized on the American version of the television show The Office, which was discussed earlier in Act One, first airing four years prior on the same network.

In 2010 and 2011, the Lonely Island offered two digital on SNL addressing the White male fear of dancing. The digital short “Boombox” explored how dance might lead to reckless sexual activity (Saturday Night Live 2010). Once again framed using hip hop visual language, Samberg raps to The Strokes’ vocals as he describes the power of

157 the boombox. In the beginning of the sketch, the boombox causes stuffy frigid White people in a country club to dance with abandon. By the end of the sketch, the boombox causes a most “disgusting” fate in which the “old White people dancing” at an old folks home leads to their fornicating “like rabbits,” “disgusting to say the least” (Saturday

Night Live 2010). In the digital short “The Creep,” the Lonely Island (featuring Black rapper ) parody recent dance fads to explore how White men are associated with dancing solely for predatory conquests of women in nightclubs (Saturday Night Live

2011). In order to do “The Creep,” the video states one merely needs a pencil mustache, high-water pants, and slick black hair. The sketch depicts the Lonely Island in their entirety dressed in identical wire-framed , , and high-waist pants performing a creepy move as they corner various women at bars and on the street in an effort to seduce them, at times even stalking them as the women undress by their bedroom windows.

I read the Lonely Island’s digital shorts as interrogating the relationship White men are presumed to have with dance and masculinity in order to address the fragility and danger of hegemonic masculinity. In both “Boombox” and “The Creep” the Lonely

Island questions the relationship between dancing and sexual conquest/activity. I also addressed this relationship between White men and dancing in Act One, Scene One, when I described how Carell’s character on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart kept getting aroused while attending a dance class with other women. In these instances, it seems

White men are not allowed to dance unless it is for sexual conquest, thus affirming their

White masculinity. However, there remains a challenge in White men embodying this space without becoming predatory or sexual in nature. In the following final analysis of

158 the work of the Lonely Island, I will analyze how the troupe employs slapstick in order to further address White masculinity and its fragile position with regards to movement.

Slapstickian Humiliation and Viral Exposure: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

The Lonely Island’s most recent feature-length film Popstar: Never Stop Never

Stopping (Schaffer and Taccone 2016), starring all the members of the troupe in front of the camera, offers an extensive music parody of White masculinity. The entire film is primarily shot as a mockumentary but also periodically incorporates narrative and musical film format. The film focuses on the rising solo career of fictional music legend

Conner4Real (performed by Andy Samberg) as he attempts to continue his solo career after breaking away from his best friends in the fictional hip hop ensemble the Style

Boyz. The film spoofs many real pop music and rap music artists in its construction and reception of Conner such as Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake (who will both be discussed at length in Act Two), ‘N Sync, The Beastie Boys, and Macklemore, among others (Wickman 2016).

Before the wardrobe malfunction occurs, the audience witnesses Conner and his team preparing logistically for Conner’s costume quick changes to occur in the middle of his musical set on stage. During these scenes, two members of Conner’s crew pull a silver, circular, changing screen around Conner’s body as he quickly changes into different wardrobe ensembles. However, as the audience sees earlier in the film, Conner’s genitalia get trapped in the garments during a rehearsal of the trick. Conner adapts to this issue by tucking his genitalia between his legs. Hours before the concert, Conner posts a

159 video of himself promoting the publicity gimmick on Snapchat—“new trick tonight”—in order to entice potential audience members to attend the concert.

At the live performance, the first two quick changes go off without a hitch.

However, the third quick change into a tuxedo backfires. Conner shouts to the audience,

“[T]op of the World!” before realizing he has exposed himself on stage completely naked, his shaved genitalia tucked between his legs. It is only when he notices the crowd’s reaction accompanied by hundreds of camera phones flashing at him that he looks down to discover what has occurred. Conner immediately rushes to explain the look of his shaved tucked-in genitalia: “Oh, shit. No. I shaved for the trick! Don’t post those pics! It’s an illusion! It’s tucked! I tuck it back! Don’t post those photos . . . I don’t know what to do right now. I want to show ya’ll my dick but I can’t show you my dick!

It’s a great conundrum! It’s a great conundrum!” Unlike Tom Hanks in Big or Bosom

Buddies, Conner has not willingly revealed himself but has been exposed on accident at the mercy of his stage crew. He is torn between exposing that which would affirm his masculinity and being socially conditioned to behave modestly on stage.

The scene then cuts to Conner and the team backstage where Conner angrily and hysterically tries to determine who is at fault for the malfunction. A bemused Hunter (the

Black hip hop performer who opens for Conner’s tour) grills him: “Where the fuck was your dick, dawg?” Conner’s manager Harry tries to calm Conner down by insisting the audience did not see anything to which Conner retorts: “I wish they had seen something!

Now there’s 10,000 people who think I got no dick! Wait. You guys know I have a dick, right?” (Schaffer and Taccone 2016). After Hunter stops laughing endlessly, he questions

160 Conner further by reiterating his former question: “But, like, where was it though?

Because that motherfucker was gone” to which Conner responds, “[W]e’ve gone over this! You know that I’ve got to tuck my shit back so that it doesn’t get tangled in the garments!” (Schaffer and Taccone 2016).

When Hunter thanks him for the hilarity ensuing from the failed publicity stunt,

Conner responds angrily, “Well, I’m so glad I could entertain you, Hunter.” The rest of the scene backstage focuses on Hunter’s provocation of Conner in which he claims to have been responsible for the prank and then denies it repeatedly in an obviously comical manner. The scene concludes with Harry cutting off Hunter stating it is not news, at which point the news on the television set behind Harry depicts the latest trending story as an image of the malfunction with the headline: “CONNER4REAL HAS NO D**K?”

(Schaffer and Taccone 2016). The final moment in the scene is a spoof of TMZ, a celebrity news website known for leaking celebrity gossip, referred to throughout Popstar as “CMZ,” where the audience witnesses the staff watch the same developing story of

Conner on the news, cackling in unison.

Before I begin to assess the ways in which the Lonely Island employs slapstick as humiliation in the wardrobe malfunction scene, I must first ask the questions: What, then, is slapstick? How does slapstick get reconfigured within a contemporary cinematic apparatus? According to Lisa Trahair in her text The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and

Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick, slapstick was first named after an object rather than meant to denote a specific comedic style. Trahair explains the term “originally referred to a stage prop constructed of two wooden paddles, joined at one end, used by

161 circus to hit each other, thereby producing a slapping sound” (2008, 47). Quoting

Don B. Wilmeth, Trahair then concludes slapstick eventually grew to refer to “‘physical or broad comedy’” (2008, 47). Trahair furthers this contextualization by citing Larry

Langman: “Slapstick, [Langman] also claims, ‘implies both the use of physical gags aimed against someone for laughs and a sense of unreality as a result of the broad gags and the improbability of the stunts’” (2008, 47). For the purposes of this analysis,

Langman’s definition regarding the sense of slapstick being used as an instrument

“against someone for laughs” as well as that which communicates an “improbability” will be most useful in understanding the way slapstick works as a device in the wardrobe malfunction scene in Popstar. Finally, this analysis also relies upon Dale’s sense of slapstick in Comedy is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies when he states the following:

M. Willson Disher claimed that there are only six kinds of jokes—falls, blows, surprise, knavery, mimicry, stupidity. They all play a part, but for comedy to register as slapstick, you need only the fall and its flip side, the blow. (The importance of the blow is evidence in the adoption of the term “slapstick,” since that’s what a slapstick was for.) In their iconic form, the fall is caused by a banana peel, and the blow is translated into a pie in the face. Thus the essence of a slapstick gag is a physical assault on, or collapse of, the hero’s dignity; as a corollary, the loss of dignity itself can result in our identifying with the victim. The mishap can be heightened by the —it’s worse if the hero’s late for his wedding than if he’s just out strolling—but that’s a difference of degree, not of kind. . . . Because slapstick plays on our fears of physical and social maladjustment, many of the typical gags slide into nightmare territory. Disproportion itself can be eerie, but often the hero acts out classic nightmares; for example, being caught onstage unprepared . . . or losing your pants at a party. (2000, 3-5)

Popstar’s wardrobe malfunction’s employment of slapstick as witnessed through this contemporary context offers a number of ways to read Conner as a humiliated hero

162 as well as an emasculated figure. As addressed by Langman and Dale, the slapstick of the failed trick threatens Conner’s dignity, which has not only consequences to his depiction as a hero but also, as seen in the fallout of Billy Squier’s career after the release of “Rock

Me Tonite,” financial consequences. It is from this moment Conner’s tour (and album) begins to tank. He attempts to change his public perception damaged by the wardrobe malfunction with yet another publicity stunt: a proposal to his girlfriend accompanied by a pack of wolves and a performance by the Black pop musician Seal. The music causes the wolves to become so agitated they break free of their restraints, attacking the private guests as well as Seal who retaliates by suing Conner in retribution for his injuries. The publicity stunt Conner orchestrates in order to rectify the damage to his public image caused by yet another publicity stunt also fails and causes his career to tank. In essence, the wardrobe malfunction does result in a “loss of dignity” as Dale states; however, I would argue that in this parody, although the malfunction may cause the audience of the film itself to “identify with the victim,” the audience within the film, aka Conner’s fandom, disidentifies with Conner as a result.

Another way in which to read the slapstickian mode of the wardrobe malfunction scene in Popstar is through the particular way the nature of the malfunction comments on the fragility of masculinity. Just before the scene occurs in the film, the audience witnesses one of the first videos for Conner’s new album titled “Equal Rights” (featuring

P*nk). A spoof on Macklemore and ’s “One Love” (Macklemore and Ryan

Lewis 2012), the video appears to promote equal rights for homosexuals. Though often parenthetically, one of the comic thrusts of the song is that no less than twenty times

163 Conner affirms and reaffirms he is “not gay.” Conner also randomly inserts symbols of masculinity to further affirm his heteromasculinity with such words as “titties,” “sports”

“sweat pants,” “beer,” “beef jerky,” and “Lynyrd Skynyrd” (The Lonely Island 2016), to name a few examples.

Through this incorporated video and other details throughout the first half of the film, Popstar sets up the fragile masculinity of our hero through which to contextualize what the wardrobe malfunction scene might mean to a character such as Conner. As stated earlier in this dissertation, gender studies scholar C.J. Pascoe asserts in her ethnography Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, the “‘fag’ position is an ‘abject’ position and, as such, is a ‘threatening specter’” (2007, 14-15). I also explained earlier in this dissertation that Pascoe further explains in her text that high school boys referred to one another as “fags” not to necessarily label themselves as homosexual, but rather to indict one another as being unmasculine. It is through this masculinist context we can read not only the video and lyrics for “Equal Rights” (

2016) but also the damage caused by the audience being unable to see his male genitalia.

This wardrobe malfunction succeeds in symbolically castrating Conner in front of his fans, which he considers his sexual partners. Earlier in the film, Conner states in voiceover, “[M]y fans and me, we’re in love. My songs are love letters, and the arena is our bedroom. The stage . . . the stage is where we fuck” (Schaffer and Taccone 2016).

During one of the final concert scenes included in Popstar, occurring just before Conner cancels his tour, the audience can see one of his crewmates, Owen, sit in the stands of the concert arena playing a game on his iPhone in which the objective of the game is to pin a

164 penis onto the image of Conner on stage exposed with his penis tucked between his legs.

As Owen slides his finger to place the penis on Conner’s crotch, the game continues to tell the player the penis is “[B]locked!” (Schaffer and Taccone 2016). If the stage is where Conner copulates with his fans and he is rendered without male genitalia, then the wardrobe malfunction itself has created a scenario in which there is no ability for the fans to have a sexual encounter with Conner.

The Fall and the Blow: The Wardrobe Malfunction as Racial Indictment

In some ways, the film Popstar especially comments on the ways in which White masculinity appropriates Blackness within the musical tradition, perhaps offering a corrective lens through which to read this problematized dynamic. This analysis will offer a hinge through which to begin exploring this exchange and will be further developed via the analyses in Act Two. For example, the number of Black musical artists interviewed to (comically) sing their praises of the musical genius of Conner’s previous hip hop group the Style Boyz include Nas, , , Questlove, and A$ap Rocky.

Conner’s debut solo album is parodically titled in homage to (or appropriation of)

Michael Jackson’s pop sensation , as Thriller, Also, which races to the top of the charts. Their manager Harry, performed by Black comedian and previous SNL cast member from the 1990s Tim Meadows, represents both the Style Boyz and Conner, and was once a member of the 1990s R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné! Finally, when Conner’s album and tour sales begin to decline, he brings on hip hop artist Hunter the Hungry

(performed by Black comedian and current SNL cast member Chris Redd) as the tour’s opening act and who plays a crucial role in the wardrobe malfunction scene. These are

165 just a few ways the film sets up the dynamic addressed in the Lonely Island’s shorts throughout its career with regards to commenting upon White masculinity as it particularly takes form in White pop stars’ appropriation (and profiting) of Blackness.

With the aim of assessing how the wardrobe malfunction scene in Popstar offers a kind of corrective lens through which to indict White masculinity and in particular its appropriation of Blackness through musical performance, I would like to first take a look at the wardrobe malfunction I would argue the Lonely Island consciously spoofs in

Popstar, which occurred during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004 featuring Justin Timberlake and .

In order to situate what I would argue is pop singer Justin Timberlake’s particular brand of White negritude26, it is important to locate Timberlake in a regional tradition of the same, i.e. Elvis Presley. Timberlake was born in 1981 in Memphis, Tennessee close to Elvis’s mansion in Graceland where Elvis lived out his last days. Elvis’s contribution to both music and musical performance revolves around his ability to merge signifiers of

Black and White culture—the hip rotations he would perform during his songs combined with the fusion of and R&B. According to minstrelsy scholar Eric Lott regarding Elvis impersonation in the collection titled Race and the Subject of

Masculinities,

[T]he problem is how to represent this crossing into “blackness” without blackface, and it is here that Elvis impersonation comes to the rescue. It is as though such performance were a sort of second-order blackface, in which, blackface having for the most part overtly disappeared, the figure of Elvis himself is now the apparently still necessary signifier of white ventures into black

26 In Act Two, I will further discuss Norman Mailer’s White negro theory which I reference here with the term “White negritude.”

166 culture—a signifier to be adopted bodily if one is to have success in achieving the intimacy with “blackness” that is crucial to the adequate reproduction of Presley’s show. (1997, 204)

Not only does Elvis’s contribution to White negritude remain incredibly influential in the history of White musical performers such as Timberlake in appropriating Blackness, but

Elvis’s formative position within the region Timberlake first began to sing and perform can offer another lens through which to understand Timberlake’s own White negritude.

A Black musician more often compared to Timberlake in terms of his solo and dance career is Michael Jackson, who also offers a complex merging of both White and

Black signifiers. As cultural critic Jamilah King states in her article titled “The Trouble

With Justin Timberlake’s Appropriation of Black Music”:

He was the white boy with the bleached blonde face and vague hip-hop swagger who could really sing the black music he unabashedly recorded. Image-wise, he chose and performed suave and often provocative black masculinities embodied by the likes of , Michael Jackson, and Prince. (2013)

It is worth noting that in terms of this concern of appropriation, Timberlake is most often associated with Black pop musicians known to have substantial White fan bases due to their ability to merge musical traditions associated with both White and Black markets.

However, as King further discusses in her article, Timberlake is able to pick and choose when to benefit from Blackness and when to benefit from Whiteness such as when he refused accountability for the Super Bowl scandal largely known as “Nipplegate” during which a wardrobe malfunction caused his co-performer (and Michael Jackson’s sister)

Janet Jackson to be inappropriately exposed on live television: “And that’s what becomes tricky with Justin, that his whiteness acts as both an entryway into popular culture and a buffer against its criticisms. Janet’s career, on the other hand, stagnated” (2013).

167 This stagnation was reignited in October of 2017 when Timberlake accepted a second invitation to perform at the halftime show during Super Bowl 2018. Michelle

Ruiz addresses the consequences Janet Jackson’s career suffered as a result of

“Nipplegate” in Vogue’s “Justin Timberlake Will Perform at the Super Bowl Halftime

Show—But What About Janet Jackson?”:

It was Jackson, not Timberlake, who was reportedly pressured to bow out “gracefully” from the 2004 Grammys shortly after the Super Bowl ; in fact, Timberlake not only went but won two awards . . . Though Jackson was the halftime show headliner back in 2004 and Timberlake was her surprise guest, he was the one who, post-incident, was to have a smash solo artist career, while, as Rolling Stone reported, Jackson was blacklisted by CBS’s parent company, Viacom, which reportedly kept “her music videos off [its] properties MTV, VH1, and radio stations under [its] .” Over time, “the blacklist spreads to include non-Viacom media entities as well.” (2017)

Racially speaking, this accidental exposure speaks volumes given the ways in which

Timberlake is indebted to the specifically for the creation of his own brand of soul-infused pop music, not to mention the choreography he performs in his music videos and on the live stage. Not only does Timberlake suffer no consequences for the exposure he himself caused, but also Janet Jackson becomes the hypersexualized

Black female trope (Hobson 2014) blacklisted as a result of his actual actions.

Timberlake recently addressed the wardrobe malfunction in a Huffington Post article titled “Timberlake Reflects on Janet Jackson Nipplegate: ‘I Stumbled.’” In the piece, written by Cole Delbyck, he admits he “had [his] wires crossed,” and claims the two singers have since made peace. According to the article, Timberlake stated: “America is harsher on women. I think America is unfairly harsh on ethnic people” (2015). Although

Timberlake speaks to the inequity of response resulting from the malfunction, he does not

168 speak to how his career skyrocketed while Jackson’s suffered nor to the choices he made not to distance himself from the very media entities said to blacklist Jackson.

As a wardrobe malfunction is recast in Popstar, however, the scene speaks volumes with regards to the cross-racial exchange and identities embedded in the film.

Conner, a White male pop star who formed his career as a hip hop-infused pop artist, must rely on Black hip hop artist Hunter in order to make his tour financially successful.

Some time after the wardrobe malfunction scene has already occurred, a standoff transpires between Conner and Hunter when Hunter begins to play increasingly longer sets, angering Conner. Conner responds by coming on stage before Hunter exits, causing the two to try to outperform the other. Neither of them budges, but as Conner begins to argue with Hunter on stage, Hunter admits he was responsible for Conner’s wardrobe malfunction.

In light of the racial dynamics playing out in “Nipplegate,” this dynamic can be read as offering a corrective lens on the matter. Hunter, a Black hip hop artist responsible for keeping Conner’s tour afloat, is in fact responsible for the slapstick “blow” to

Conner’s “fall.” As a kind of assault on Conner presumably for his position of privilege,

Hunter gets one over on the White co-opter. But not only does Hunter, a Black male, expose Conner, the White male, but whereas it was the Black female Jackson’s sexual body which was exposed during “Nipplegate” (Brown 2017), in this case it is the lack of male sexuality making the exposure so symbolic for Conner. In Popstar there is no scapegoat for the trick itself for it is Conner who was exposed. It is Conner whose career suffers as a result. Although Conner does redeem himself at the end of the film by

169 reuniting with the Style Boyz, his redemption is not enacted on the backs and/or labor of

Black entertainers. The slapstickian mechanics of this scene enact a layered gendered and racial commentary on the history of White and Black stage entertainment. When Conner retorts to Hunter backstage he is so glad he can “entertain” Hunter, the comment speaks to the heart of this satiric , given that, as was addressed earlier in this dissertation, Black performers have served as mere “entertainment” for White audiences since the age of slavery and minstrelsy.

The Lonely Island offers a way to view the slapstick instrument as both a narrative and satirical device, one in which the slapstick moment is significant not only in how it addresses the imperfection of human life but also how White men respond to the limits of the body once the moment strikes. In Popstar the Lonely Island updates its use of the slapstick mode by placing it within a contemporary context, in which the moment of humiliation multiplies through the immediate power of the Internet and social media.

As Henri Bergson states in his canonical essay “Laughter,” first published in 1900, “the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human” (1980, 62). For even pop stars like Conner4Real must live within bodies and it is this breakage between the unrealistic expectation of the twenty-first century music fan and the unrealistic pressure of the twenty-first century White male performer to which the slapstickian humiliation can speak most cogently.

To conclude, the White man dance as seen from Tom Hanks to the Lonely Island evolves from an image helping to support the construction of archetypal White masculinity to one used to question the relationship between dance and heteronormative

170 masculinity. With Tom Hanks and Steve Carell, in differing ways and alongside differing historical underpinnings, the archetypal everyman persona was juxtaposed with dance to bring about new insights in White American masculinity. With Billy Squier, whose video was released at the height of AIDS and homosexuality-related panic in the 1980s, one sees how a White male’s feminine expressions can be read as responsible for the demise of an entire career. Matthew Perry’s construction and embodiment of Chandler in the late

1990s was perhaps the most explicitly homophobic employment of White man dancing, in which dance was used to further the question of his heterosexuality. Finally, the

Lonely Island gives viewers an idea of how the White Man Dance trope can be used as a satiric device to question these ideologies of masculinity. The next chapter will offer movement analyses establishing how the White Man Dance is employed to trouble or complicate the role Blackness performs in the construction of these dancing images of

White men.

171 CHAPTER VI

ACT TWO, SCENE ONE

“PRETTY FLY FOR A WHITE GUY”27: HUGHES’S MODERN- DAY MINSTREL, RONALD MILLER’S AFRICAN TRIBAL RITUAL, AND NAPOLEON DYNAMITE’S TRIUMPHANT DEBUT

The question is not whether black and white artists can work together—artists need each other, despite all those middlebrow rumors to the contrary. The question is whether black and white citizens can work together. Black artists remember how much white artists have stolen from them, and this certainly creates a certain tension; but the rejection by many black artists of white endeavor contains far more than meets the eye. What black artists are rejecting, when the rejection occurs, is not the possibility of working with white artists. What they are rejecting is the American system which makes pawns of white men and victims of black men and which really, at bottom, considers all artistic efforts to be either irrelevant or threatening. —James Baldwin, “The Price May Be Too High” (2010, 105)

Introduction

In 2010 comedian and talk show host Jimmy Fallon introduced a recurring segment on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (2009-2014), which he then brought with him to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (when he became The Tonight Show’s new host) that became a viral smash hit. Titled “History of Rap,” the recurring segment features the comedian Jimmy Fallon and pop musician/actor Justin Timberlake widely known as “best buds” on and off screen who “educate” the audience on the music and dance history of Black (and occasionally White) hip hop and rap as they sing and dance through a mash-up of various hits while being backed by the show’s house band The

27 “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy),” The Offspring (1998).

172 Roots, also renowned in American hip hop (2014-2018). To date, there have been six separate occurrences of the segment “History of Rap,” as well as numerous articles from cultural media outlets promoting and ranking the various songs featured on each segment.

Fallon and Timberlake’s recurring segment relies upon the mechanism of comparison via the signification of Blackness juxtaposed with Whiteness in order to comically entertain the audience. Timberlake, whose artistry has been informed by Black soul and R&B throughout his career (Feldsine 2013), could be read as performing as the

White Negro (Mailer 1957) archetype in “History of Rap,” even going so far as to comically police Fallon’s performance at times when Fallon either over-identifies with the Blackness signified in particular clips of songs or when he lacks the self-awareness to recognize he is performing Black identity in “inappropriate” ways. In this way, the two

White men operating in concert with one another can be seen as performing a kind of parody on Whiteness. Not only does the segment employ the mechanism of comparison between Fallon and Timberlake themselves, much like the established vaudeville structure of the fool and the straight man as discussed earlier in this dissertation, but the segment also remains dependent upon the audience’s own assessment and familiarity of

Fallon and Timberlake’s performance of the associated dance fads they execute against the original, most often Black, creators of those dance movements within American popular culture.

What becomes questionable in the comic engine of signifying comparisons in

“History of Rap” and what will be further explored in the analyses of the sequences of focus in Act Two concerns humor. Who exactly is the true object of the laughter

173 provoked throughout “History of Rap”? Certainly American television in particular has made much use of the parody of Whiteness, seen in such televisual artifacts as SNL, The

Colbert Report, and The Office, to name a few examples. However, when the particular brand of comedy is being built through an audience’s inherent understanding of the relationship between Blackness and Whiteness, it could be argued that White performers are again, just as in the era of Blackface minstrelsy, elevating themselves at the expense of Black bodies while using the currency of Black cultural artifacts to do so.

Daniel F. Potter establishes the cultural concern surrounding the ways in which

Fallon and Timberlake comically use the engine of comparison for laughter in “History of Rap” in his paper “Cultural Appropriation as Masked Racism: Humor, Hip-Hop and

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” According to Potter,

[A]t multiple points during the series either Fallon or Timberlake in a dramatic nature seemingly takes the bits too far. In the History of Rap 2, while rapping the lyrics “I am getting so hot I wanna take my clothes off” and dancing in a seductive, albeit intentionally comedic manner, Timberlake pauses as if to acknowledge the absurdity of his evident whiteness contrasting with cultural stereotypes of black sexuality. Later in the same routine, Fallon follows a similar script except to display overt aggression. This leads to a theatrical interaction between the two as if to communicate that, while evidently unacceptable given Fallon’s whiteness, the hostile reaction was a natural expression of Hip Hop. The shtick continues in History of Rap 3 when Timberlake again reprimands Fallon for rapping about using an assault rifle, in which the duo pauses to ensure the irrationality of the comedic message reaches its full effect—that of Jimmy Fallon owning and potentially using an AK-47. In the History of Rap 5, while aggressively lunging at the camera and singing “straight outta Compton, crazy mother . . .” Fallon is cut off by Timberlake before completing the explicit lyric and the two pause to go over their by now familiar routine. Timberlake questions the authenticity of Fallon claiming through his rapping that he is from Compton. Again the comedic element rests entirely on the public image of Jimmy Fallon as a lovable, friendly white person contrasted with the infamous reputation of Compton’s blighted disinvestment of gang violence and predominant African American population. (2015)

174 As Potter makes clear in his analysis, “History of Rap” could be read as relying upon the audience’s memory and familiarity with the original signifiers of Blackness embedded in rap and hip hop, then made comic by Fallon and Timberlake’s exaggeration of the

“misperformance” of those same signifiers by themselves as White male performers.

However, in constructing their segment in this method, Blackness itself also inevitably becomes the butt of the joke as the segment seems to also demand reliance upon stereotypes to comic end.

In his groundbreaking text The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American

Literary Criticism, originally published in 1988, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse

Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchens Center for African and

African American Research at , contributes to the field of semiotics in the larger branch of linguistics by using the term “signifyin” to represent both Ferdinand de Saussure’s foundational semiotic concept “signifying” as well as “signifyin(g),” the

Black vernacular rhetorical practice. Gates, Jr.’s theories established in this text will be crucial in exploring how the White male performers of Act Two rely upon the process of signification of both Whiteness and Blackness in their associated texts.

As Gates, Jr. states in his text, “[S]ince Saussure, at least, the three terms signification, signifier, and signified have been fundamental to our thinking about general linguistics and, of late, about criticism specifically” (2014, 52). Saussure’s foundational theory of signification defines the signifier as “the form that the sign takes” and the signified as “the concept to which it refers.” The sign itself, therefore, represents the combination of the signifier and the signified (Joseph 2012, 587). Gates, Jr. extends

175 Saussure’s standard theory of semiotics to discuss the Black vernacular tradition in order to attempt to answer the following question, one I intend to invoke throughout Act Two:

“What did/do black people signify in a society in which they were intentionally introduced as the subjugated, as the enslaved cipher? Nothing on the x axis of white signification, and everything on the y axis of blackness” (2014, 52).

In his discussion of the Black vernacular tradition, commonly known in mainstream Black American culture as “signifyin(g),” Gates, Jr. addresses various definitions of this rhetorical practice. Perhaps the most accessible and useful definition that Gates, Jr. quotes stems from Roger D. Abrahams:

Signifying seems to be a Negro term, in use if not in origin. It can mean any of a number of things; in the case of the toast about the signifying monkey, it certainly refers to the trickster’s ability to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie. It can mean in other instances the propensity to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point. It can mean making fun of a person or situation. Also it can denote speaking with the hands and eyes, and in this respect encompasses a whole complex of expressions and gestures. Thus it is signifying to stir up a fight between neighbors by telling stories; it is signifying to make fun of a policeman by parodying his motions behind his back; it is signifying to ask for a piece of cake by saying, “my brother needs a piece of cake.” (2014, 59)

Gates, Jr. connects foundational definitions of signification with Black vernacular rhetorical practices in order to question the role that the subjugation of Blackness, alongside the ever-developing modes of Black rhetorical figuration, performs within

American and European processes of signification. Although Gates, Jr. focuses dominantly on the oral modes of signification and signifyin(g), Act Two will hinge on these foundational theories in order to question the ways in which the dancers (and choreographies) of focus are engaged with a dialogue of signification regarding

Whiteness and Blackness. What Gates, Jr. makes clear is signifyin(g) has become such a

176 foundation for American culture that American culture is always already signified within embodiment and expression. I would add to that contention by arguing I read this signification as also enacted in a movement capacity as it occurs in White male performers operating within the structure of American popular culture.

Act Two, Scene One will then focus solely on depictions of White male teenage dancers within popular American film from the 1980s to the present. In Weird Science

(Hughes 1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Hughes 1986), Pretty in Pink (Deutch 1986),

Can’t Buy Me Love (Rash 1987), and Napoleon Dynamite (Hess 2004), the films featuring performances of White male teenaged characters can be read as signifying

Blackness in their movement (in concert with the musical selection for the movement) as a kind of marker to represent cultural currency and/or identification with other aspects of

Blackness. The role Blackness performs in these sequences can be read as dependent upon the White male teen character’s affirmed (or tenuous) position within hegemonic masculinity and teen popularity.

John Hughes Toes the Line Between Cultural Homage and Racial Mimicry

It has become almost inarguable to state that filmmaker John Hughes, most popularly known for creating , Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in

Pink, Weird Science, and Sixteen Candles, is responsible for the popularly recognized version of the American teenager on the big screen, as argued by A.O. Scott in The New

York Times’s “The John Hughes Touch” (2009), Adam Sternbergh in New York

Magazine’s “The Post-Hughes Teenager” (2009), and Robbie Collin in The Telegraph’s

“Will There Ever Be Another John Hughes?” (2015). Another major contribution Hughes

177 lent to 1980s films featuring teenage characters involved his treatment of class and gender. According to Jonathan Bernstein, author of Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of

Teenage Movies, “the function of girls in teen movies (except for those helmed by John

Hughes) was to display the good-natured tolerance in the face of stalking, voyeurism, and fumbled attempts at seduction” (1997, 173-174)28. He further argues Hughes was the one director of the time whose characters were constantly “railing against cliques and caste systems” (1997, 5). Despite Hughes’s often-adept attention regarding the female teenage in many of his most popular films, he has largely been indicted by critics for traipsing in and contributing to the perpetuation of racial stereotypes.

Although I was a fan of the iconic Hughes film The Breakfast Club and enjoyed many of his other films, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Curly Sue, , and

Home Alone, I mostly felt as a young biracial teenager raised by a single Asian father that

John Hughes’s movies were not primarily meant for me. They were first and foremost films meant for young White American teenagers with money who were able to participate in the currency of high school popularity.

Another reason I felt strongly Hughes’s movies were not meant for me involved

Hughes’s use of the other (Zevallos 2011) as comic value in extraneous ways. In my

28 It should be noted here briefly, however, that regardless of Hughes’s thoughtful of young women, many of his films depicted problematic narrative tendencies with regards to the objectification of teenage girls and their sexual entanglements with male characters in films like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. The heroine of many of Hughes’s films and long considered Hughes’s muse, Molly Ringwald reflects on these dynamics in the age of the #metoo movement in her thoughtful essay published in The New Yorker titled “What About ‘The Breakfast Club’?” (2018).

178 view, the gags used in many of his films regarding his minoritized characters seemed superfluous to the storyline, serving only to add a brief dash of mockery at the expense of those bodies sprinkled throughout his films. As a teenager, I had not yet developed a consciousness for the multitude of ways Hughes appropriates race to this end; however, as a woman of Asian descent, I was immediately triggered by his use of yellowface in

Sixteen Candles with the now well-interrogated character of Long Duk Dong (Hughes

1984). I should point out the following analysis is not meant to indict or condemn the ways in which Hughes exploits othered bodies for comic relief. After all, this was the

1980s in popular American film; the era of The Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi (Weintraub

1984) and Short Circuit’s Fisher Stevens Ben Jabityua (performed in brownface)

(Badham 1986). I see Hughes as a product of his generation, privileged class status, and

American culture’s mostly unexamined experimentation in racial stereotypes at the time.

In 2008, NPR explored characters of American fiction, , and popular culture through their six-month series titled “in character.” One of the characters the series addressed could be easily referred to as Hughes’s most controversial character,

Long Duk Dong. In her article “Long Duk Dong: Last of the Hollywood Stereotypes?”

Alison Macadam explores the lasting impact of the infamous character from Hughes’s teen classic Sixteen Candles. Long Duk Dong is a foreign exchange student from an unidentified Asian country who utilizes the clearly foreign-to-him fork and spoon as a pair of chopsticks. His every entrance throughout the film is announced by the sound of a gong. “If you’re being called Long Duk Dong,” editors of the Asian and Asian American pop culture magazine Giant Martin Wong and Eric Nakamura explain, “you’re

179 comic relief against a sea of people unlike you. You’re being portrayed as a guy who just came off a boat and who’s out of control. It’s like every bad stereotype possible, loaded into one character” (2008).

Although Hughes is listed on popular culture blog sites such as SBPDL (Stuff

Black People Don’t Like) (SBPDL 2009), the most common criticism of John Hughes with regards to race, aside from the aforementioned use of yellowface in Sixteen Candles, is his largely neglecting to include even the token Black character in a majority of his films. I would further extend this critique to argue that Hughes paints impressions of

Blackness throughout his films, often resulting in a commodification of racial stereotype.

Mostly Hughes performs this problematic mechanism through actual Black bodies such as in the jazz club scene in Weird Science and the “Twist and Shout” parade scene in

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In this analysis I will ultimately argue that Hughes transfers this exchange in racial tropes onto the White male character of Duckie in Pretty in Pink

(1986), culminating in the character’s triumph (and downfall) in the lip sync dance to

Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” (1966).

Although popular and academic media largely agree Long Duk Dong is a racial stereotype serving Sixteen Candles mostly as comic relief, Hughes’s similar denigration and exploitation of Blackness within the fabric of his other iconic teen films is rarely explored. In order to give context for the ways in which Blackness is commodified and subjugated in Pretty in Pink (and epitomized in Duckie’s dance sequence), I will give two brief readings of the signification of Blackness in Weird Science (released the year before

180 Pretty in Pink hit movie theaters) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (released during the shooting of Pretty in Pink).

A Signifying Economy of Blackness in Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Weird Science: An Analysis

In the teen film Weird Science (1985) two White male nerds use a computer to generate the perfect dream woman. As will be shown in the following analysis, I read the jazz scene in this film as not only unessential to the overall plot of the film but also as a conflation of one of the most significant eras of cross-fertilization of

African American vernacular dance, music, and song. As Gates, Jr. reminds us in the previously mentioned text The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American

Literary Criticism:

Jazz is the classical music of twentieth-century American culture, and as I state in this book, it is based on the art of riffing, on repetition and revision, the very definition of signifying in the tradition. All the jazz greats, going back to Jelly Roll Morton, had “quoted” other compositions and solos, making improvisation one of the highest American art forms. (2014, xxx)

In this four-minute scene, White male nerd Gary Wallace (performed by Anthony

Michael Hall), his White male partner-in-crime Wyatt Donnelly (performed by Ilan

Mitchell-Smith), and their virtually created White dream woman Lisa (performed by

Kelly Le Brock) get drunk in a jazz bar. What proceeds to unfold for the viewers next reads like a visual re-enactment of a bad joke: “two White dudes walk into a bar.” As the

Black patrons the boys are surrounded by force the “dudes” to drink, one White dude,

Gary, suddenly transforms into a “cool cat” complete with talk as he waxes morosely about his romantic troubles using Black slang and affect.

181 In the very beginning of the scene, the White-signified male nerd Gary sits with his upper body erect in a sports and tie, his hair curled and coiffed. Mostly Black men dressed in various types of suits holding themselves in varying relaxed postures surround him. One man appears to be of Latino descent by virtue of his exaggerated accent. Gary attempts to tell the group about his problems using diction such as “trials and tribulations,” “my folks,” and “you guys,” signifying a White, middle-class vernacular speech (Hughes 1985). It is also clear he is not of the company he keeps based on the camera’s close-ups of the silent confused looks of Gary’s audience in the scene while he speaks. However, after one of the men coaxes him to get drunk, the formerly

White nerdy teenage male miraculously transforms into one of “them” as the audience now witnesses Gary don one of the men’s and smoke a cigar while shaking his head and snapping his fingers. Though to the audience, both within the film as well as the viewing audience, Gary swiftly embodies and employs an affect appearing Black, he is still the same White male teen nerd he has been throughout the film.

His diction and his delivery of that diction is the most distinctive change: his diction has drastically changed with such examples as the repeated use of “man” and other words and phrases like “crazy little eighth grade bitch,” “big titties,” and “baby”

(Hughes 1985). Gary has now adopted recognizable conventions of Black dialect such as the dropping off of the g in “I’m tellin’ the truth here” and the syntactical shift of double negatives in “[S]he wouldn’t have had to worry about no titties for the rest of her life.”

Additionally, Gary’s masculinity and membership in this group is newly affirmed when one of his audience members asks if he called the “woman” he referred to earlier on the

182 telephone, to which Gary retorts to another sitting next to him as a kind of aside: “What’s this boy talkin’ about, ‘on the telephone’? Explain it to him” (Hughes 1985).

Gary’s posture also significantly changes in this second part of this scene as he gestures far more demonstratively than at the beginning of the scene. He holds his upper body loose, collapsing the physical space between himself and his new friends. The scene concludes with a return to Gary’s previously emasculated and White male nerdy character’s body language when he loses his balance as he leans forward to talk, falling on the floor from his excessive drunkenness.

At this point, I would like to re-invoke Gates, Jr.’s question quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “What did/do black people signify in a society in which they were intentionally introduced as the subjugated, as the enslaved cipher? Nothing on the x axis of white signification, and everything on the y axis of blackness” (2014, 52). To put more explicitly, this short scene, isolated from the rest of the plot in its specificity to

Blackness, can be read as largely serving to appropriate and reduce jazz, a with a complex cultural, artistic, and dance history, to the most basic of stereotypes.

Further, Blackness is erased largely from the substance of the film’s plot and character development, used instead to predominantly hypermasculinize a twelve-year-old White boy through the hip and overtly sexualized lingo with which Black men have been burdened throughout American history for the purpose of a comic gag. Finally, I would argue an additional way Anthony Michael Hall’s performance can be read is as a version of vocal and gestural Blackface. Hall wears the mask of gesture and slang to assimilate to

183 his non-White audience within the structure of the scene and thus creates a racial economy for Hughes’s mostly White middle-class audience.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: An Analysis

In the following analysis, I will explore how the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off employs Black-inspired choreography on a White male body to lend a register of coolness to the White male teenager skipping school. Ferris Bueller (performed by

Matthew Broderick) fakes being sick in order to take a day off from high school, convincing his girlfriend as well as his best friend Cameron to join him. During their day of freedom, Ferris crashes a parade float in the city celebrating Von Steuben Day while lip-syncing to ’ “Twist and Shout” (1963). Because Ferris is portrayed throughout the film as embodying the ultimate cool White boy teenager archetype, he somehow is able to entice the entire crowd to dance.

The Isley Brothers first performed the song “Twist and Shout” in 1962. A year later the song became explosively popular through a recorded by The

Beatles. This song exemplifies a fusion of the vocalizations and movements of Black

American culture in the 1960s. According to Elijah Wald in How The Beatles Destroyed

Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music,

[I]n the more demonstrative black congregations, to “shout” is to be possessed by the spirit, losing control of your mind and body, flailing and jumping so that the people nearby have to protect you from hurting yourself, and the Isleys conveyed all the joy and power of that ecstatic experience. (2011, 234-35)

As previously defined by Tim Wall, the Twist “was a noncontact couples’ dance, popularized on Philadelphia-based and nationally syndicated Dick Clark’s American

Bandstand, and danced at this point to Chubby Checker’s recording of the same name”

184 (2008, 188). Wall establishes in his essay that, as argued by Robert Pruter and others, the

Twist had its “origins in the African American community” (2008, 189). As a dance form, the Twist became biracial through the access the American television culture provided and similar to The Beatles’ imitation of the Isley Brothers with their vocal rendition of “Twist and Shout,” White bodies learned these dances by copying how they saw Black bodies dance on their home television set. The very layered relationship between White and Black bodies the Twist represented (and thus referenced in The Beatles’ cover version of Twist and Shout) can be read as further signified in the dance sequence during the parade scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

In this scene, Broderick’s swinging arms accompanied by snapping fingers, twisting hips, and step-touch may bring to mind various choreographies from the 1960s, such as the vocal choreography of created by resident choreographer and tap dancer (Hill 2014, 210-211). In the parade scene, the White marching band leaders imitate Broderick’s step-touch dance while a group of male and female Black dancers enter into the frame with a cross-legged walk and a downward arm swing with a fingersnap, ending the movement phrase with a pecking motion most likely created by The Three Chocolateers for the film New Faces of 1937 in the late 1930s during the Lindy Hop era (1937). Besides those two dominant displays of movement, the scene includes close-up shots of wiggling bottoms and various parts of the crowds “getting down” with Ferris Bueller. Although this scene is certainly not rife with a more egregious objectification of Black bodies and culture as it is in the previously- explored scene, Ferris still represents the White male ringleader at the center of it all

185 while the true originators of both the music and the dance remain in supporting roles, similar to what occurs in “History of Rap” as discussed briefly at the beginning of Act

Two. What these two scenes do illustrate is the way in which one could begin to read

Hughes’s construction of a racial economy. I read this racial economy as slowly and gradually woven into a less obviously subjugated yet still largely Whitewashed world in

Pretty in Pink, culminating in the signification of the dance scene performed by Jon

Cryer in the record store.

Duckie as Racial Commodity in Pretty in Pink

I initially invested so personally in Pretty in Pink due to its offbeat heroine Andie

(performed by Molly Ringwald), poor but resourceful (she designs and sews her own clothing ensembles). She was also one of the earliest teen characters I remember being able to relate to as she too was the victim of her mother’s abandonment as well as being raised by a single father. Secondarily, I invested in the film because of the character

Duckie (performed by Jon Cryer). Like many young girls coming of age in the late-1980s to early 1990s, I considered myself #TeamDuckie before such naming conventions were invented with which to post on social media as a way to align oneself with others. Like many young girls who rooted for the goofy, pompadour-rocking underdog in John

Hughes’s 1987 teen classic, I largely fell in love with Duckie due to a single signature scene in the film, most often referred to as the “Duckie dance” (Carpenter 2015).

As John Strausbaugh reminds us in Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult

& Imitation in American Popular Culture, “[S]till and all, only a handful of words and symbols have been considered absolutely taboo in current American society,

186 unreservedly banned and forbidden. The swastika is one. The n word, uttered by anyone not Black is another. Blackface is third” (2007, 13). Strausbaugh continues, defining and contextualizing Blackface for his readers, a definition that will serve for the duration of this section:

Blackface is a form of racist caricature invented by White Americans in the minstrel-show days of the 1800s. It is a shameful reminder of White America’s vicious hatred of Blacks. A part of America’s past that is best forgotten in our more enlightened, polite era. . . . However shameful we find it, blackface has played a large and integral role in the formation of American popular culture. It existed before the heyday of the minstrel show, and has persisted long after the minstrels faded away. Its influence or at least echoes can be seen in American music, theater, literature, film, and TV, right through to today. Although it was certainly racist, it was sometimes something other than that, a reflection of the complex of neuroses and pathologies that mark relations between Whites and Blacks in America—a complicated web of love and hate, fear and guilt, attraction and repulsion, mockery and mimicry. (2007, 24)

I read Duckie’s character as equated with qualities associated with the stereotypes of

Black Americans at the time of Pretty in Pink’s release throughout the film. Duckie serves the film’s narrative much the way minstrel characters were developed and employed in theater at the end of the nineteenth century as buffoonish clowns providing an exploration into class and other social issues. Finally, the following analysis will show how the Duckie dance can be read through the signification of Blackness not only in the movements Cryer performs in accordance with the song choice but also in terms of what the dance represents regarding the construction of Duckie’s character and how the scene functions in the larger narrative of the film.

Andie Walsh is a working-class White female teenager being raised by an unstable single father whose mother abandoned the family three years prior. Her best friend Phil Dale, known throughout the movie as “Duckie,” is of a considerably lower

187 class stratum than Andie. Duckie adores Andie to the point of obsession. The two of them spend much of their time together at the record store Trax where Andie works with the owner and her other best friend Iona (performed by Annie Potts) who serves as a kind of surrogate mother for Andie throughout the film. However, tension arises when Andie passes Duckie over in order to date Blane (performed by Andrew McCarthy), a so-called

“richie” and popular student in the high school all the characters attend (Deutch 1986).

Duckie’s costuming consists of distinctive yet mismatched items such as a porkpie hat, bull’s head , grey checkered , John Lennon-styled shades, an uncoordinated vest, and pointed-toe white dress shoes worn with chunky striped tube . His costume was inspired by the Boy subculture, a group of English working-class youths who embraced the biracial attitudes of the rock ‘n’ roll culture of the 1950s (Berkowitz 2016). Combined with Duckie’s 1950s Teddy Boy persona are subtle hints signifying 1980s hip hop culture such as the walls in Duckie’s meager bedroom tagged with (Sawyer 2017) and his sole identification of his Duckie

“brand” through his dirty, white, flashy shoes (Mellery-Pratt 2014). An added layer of

Black signification hinted at is Duckie’s over-identification via his sense of style, an aspect of his identity he clearly prides himself on regardless of the expressions of derision his outfits receive regularly from passersby in the halls at school or even from Andie.

Duckie’s fidelity to the construction and embodiment of his dandy persona while living amid noted squalor is another way in which he embodies the hip hop identity of the time. His walls are bare except for the graffiti; his room empty, save the mattress on the floor. Additionally, he is the only teenager in the film who does not own a car (he

188 transports himself via bicycle). Duckie is also the only character in the film with no mention of an adult figure resembling a parent or guardian. Interestingly, this juxtaposition between his disadvantaged home life circumstances and his sartorial identity in public as a dapper dandy can also be read as reminiscent of the young Black men in the 1980s deeply invested in hip hop culture, in which one uses the material artifact in fashion such as shoes and clothing to better disguise the poverty and rootlessness dictating the harsh reality of their double life. A final way in which Duckie’s persona as a dandy can be read is through the iconography of the minstrelsy era via the previously-discussed character Zip Coon, one of the earliest minstrel character types of the late nineteenth century: the Northern Black urban dandy who dressed ostentatiously and spoke in malapropisms, thus undermining his desire to appear dignified.

In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other

Contexts, dance scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild offers two contentions regarding

Blackface bringing possible insights towards further exploring the racialized construction of Duckie’s character. First, she describes the mockery of Blacks by the White working- class as “grotesque characterizations of blacks as primitive, childish, ignorant, oversexed, and so on” (1998, 83). Duckie embodies these traits throughout the film in various ways, largely in one-liners met with clear disdain and annoyance from various teenagers at school, including Andie. Further, Dixon-Gottschild acknowledges the connection between the Blackface minstrel and the clown, stating, “blacking up can be seen as similar to applying Whiteface and taking on the attendance persona of the clown. . . .

Donning a mask, literally or symbolically, is a survival mechanism for mediating the

189 conflicting waters of mother culture and dominant society” (1998, 84-85). In this case, the clown/Blackface character type can be read as signified and expressed through

Duckie as a way to survive the harshness of poverty and unpopularity in a high school largely dominated by the wealthy Whites as well as to battle his unrequited devotion to

Andie.

It cannot be easily disputed, however, that Duckie’s finest and most distinctive moment in the entire film occurs when Duckie lip syncs and dances to a record playing

Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” in the record store. Kenny Ortega, also responsible for the previously discussed parade sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, choreographed the Duckie dance.

Because of the explosive direction the exaggerated lip sync performance has taken in American popular culture as a theatrical format, it can be difficult to attest to the role minstrelsy’s theatrical lineage has served this dance sequence. However, certainly one can see evidence within the Duckie dance of what Dixon-Gottschild names as the

White representations of Black bodies, such as the “exaggerated lips,” “boisterous to the point of grotesqueness,” “vigorous foot tapping,” “particularly expressive arms and hands,” and the body “constantly in contorted or distorted positions” (1998, 108). What may come to mind most quickly when watching Duckie perform are more contemporary impersonations of well known Black dancing singers such as James Brown or Michael

Jackson. Also embodied throughout this dance sequence is the oversexed performance of

Duckie’s lip sync of the song’s lyrics (often referred to as an Otis Redding impersonation by those posting the sequence on YouTube), which could be read through Lott’s

190 theorization of White fear and exoticization of the sexualized Black male body referenced earlier in this dissertation. Although Duckie seems to borrow his moves from iconic

Black American vernacular dancers, the camera flattens and fragments the moves so the audience never sees one of the most signifying body movements of the popular Black dance aesthetic, the swiveling of the hips. Finally, I find it curious that Otis Redding’s

“Try a Little Tenderness” (1966) is the only song in the film not only recorded outside the era of the movie’s release, but also the only song on the soundtrack performed by a

Black musician. This further adds to the possible signification of Duckie via a lens of

Blackness previously developed across the film.

Another way in which this sequence shares similarities with early minstrelsy performances is in the reception of the audience within the film (Andie and Iona). This response acts as for what the dance comes to symbolize in the film’s narrative and for Duckie’s character in particular. Throughout the sequence, it is clear

Duckie’s performance piques the attention and curiosity of the older of the two women,

Iona, whereas the intended receiver for the performance, Andie, finds the dance clearly unappealing, as seen from the camera’s close-ups of her many facial reactions of annoyance and disdain throughout the sequence.

After the dance concludes, Andie and Iona immediately vacate to the back of the store, causing Duckie to make a remark about his body odor in a Black vocal affect, furthering his persona as jilted clown: “Do I offend?” (Deutch 1986). Unbeknownst to

Duckie, what the audience will soon discover is that Andie eagerly awaits the arrival of

191 her “richie” date Blane, thus signaling her official rejection of Duckie and resulting in their subsequent estrangement with one another.

One way I read this scene narratively, made complicated by the signification of

Blackness regarding the construction of Duckie as a character, is how the dance functions as a moment of true vulnerability and the first moment Duckie expresses his romantic feelings to Andie. Immediately following Duckie’s dance Andie not only rejects his advances but also chooses Blane, a White male character resembling wealth and White privilege throughout the film. This lip sync performance to a Black soul song, alongside its layering of Blackness as commodity (further complicated by the ways in which

Duckie is racially marked throughout the film as established earlier), serves to complete the emasculation of Duckie as a character. Therefore, I find the Duckie dance incredibly revealing regarding the way Hughes employs a racial economy in his films, even those seemingly solely White-centered.

As has been discussed in texts such as Susannah Gora’s You Couldn’t Ignore Me

If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation (2010) and

Jon Cryer’s memoir So That Happened: A Memoir (2015), Duckie and Andie end up together in the film’s original ending. However, when a test audience screened the film’s ending, the young audience booed unanimously when Duckie and Andie first hold hands during the finale. This led the director Howard Deutch (in consultation with Hughes as screenwriter) to change the ending so that Blane and Andie end up together instead. The teenager-muse Molly Ringwald also held influence over Hughes regarding the ending and felt Andie would simply be more attracted to someone who looked like Andrew

192 McCarthy rather than someone who looked and behaved like Jon Cryer. According to

Cryer’s memoir, Ringwald was also one of the first cast members to state Duckie was gay

(2015)29.

These attitudes of Duckie’s character provide an interesting duality through which to read Duckie’s masculinity with regards to the iconic dance sequence in the film. Is he a dancing minstrel or a lovable queen? These two readings harken back to earlier discussions in this dissertation not only of Eddie Murphy’s famous sketch, that the sexuality of White dancing men will thus be questioned, but also back to Kimmel’s assertion that a man’s position in hegemonic masculinity stays intact so long as he remains immobile and stoic. Throughout the film, Blane remains the immobile statue.

The difference between Duckie and Blane is quite similar to the ways in which Michael

Scott and Jim Halpert are embodied and differentiated in The Office as briefly mentioned in Act One. These similarly different embodiments of stoic Blane and dancing Duckie imply the traditional masculine figure does not need to dance to get the girl because the girl comes to him. However, even thirty years later, it is not so easy to push Duckie aside, as evidenced by the endurance of his famous record store performance (Carpenter 2015;

Larson 2015).

How a Tribal African Ritual Can Be Mistaken for the Latest Dance Trend: Can’t Buy Me Love, American Bandstand, and the Privilege of Popularity

The year after the release of Pretty in Pink, Hughes released Some Kind of

Wonderful (Deutch 1987), another teen film that further explores how teens negotiate

29 For a more in-depth reading of the potential queerness of Pretty in Pink, especially regarding the construction of Duckie’s character, please see Dustin Bradley Goltz’s “‘Sensible’ Suicide, Brutal Selfishness, and John Hughes’s Queer Bonds” (2013).

193 class distinctions. Again in collaboration with director Howard Deutch, Hughes sought to use Some Kind of Wonderful to re-envision certain aspects of Pretty in Pink’s narrative by creating a film in which two teens emerging from similar working-class backgrounds do end up together. Hughes’s urgency to rework certain aspects of Pretty in Pink arose from being forced to change its ending. As Gora explains, “[A]lthough Hughes would not direct Wonderful, his imprint on the film would be unmistakable, especially because of the almost embarrassingly similar plot points shared between his scripts for this film and

Pretty in Pink. Switch the genders of the key characters, and the stories are virtually interchangeable” (2010, 204). Gora continues by establishing the obvious similarities between the two films while making particular note of one clear distinction: “the one great difference between Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful: here, Keith chooses the misunderstood outcast best friend (Watts) over the conventional dreamy girl

(Amanda). This was the kind of ending that Duckie fans had been longing for since

Pretty in Pink” (2010, 229).

In his Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema since 1980,

Timothy Shary succinctly addresses the controversy surrounding the alternate ending mentioned earlier in Pretty in Pink:

No less than four reasons have been cited for the changed ending of the film from the original John Hughes script, and from the first answer print (shown only within the studio), which had Andie and Duckie together rather than her and Blane. Some critics’ theories dominated discussion for over two decades, with Bernstein offering the most common understanding: “Test audiences balked at this outcome. They wanted to see the poor girl get the rich boy of her dreams. They didn’t care about the dignity of the oppressed” . . . Similar stories have been repeated in multiple sources since then, including the 2006 DVD release of Pretty in Pink (Everything’s Duckie Edition), in a featurette titled The Original Ending: The Lost Dance that repeats the test audience response as a culprit, but also cites

194 “Ringwald’s dislike of the pairing of Andie and Duckie because she believed she had no romantic chemistry with Jon Cryer,” as reported by Rebecca Taylor . . . (2014, 366)

However the studio audience might have responded, American teenage audiences would later largely come to favor Duckie as the true outcast hero in no small part due to the popularity of his iconic dance number discussed in the previous section. In between these two Romeo & Juliet-esque class teenage romances crept another (non-John Hughes) teen film attempting to capitalize on the popularity of this narrative arc: Can’t Buy Me Love

(Rash 1987). As will be discussed in this section, Can’t Buy Me Love also integrated the lens of cross-racial dance in order to possibly further comment on White masculinity and privilege.

Can’t Buy Me Love (1987) was released just six months before Some Kind of

Wonderful. Originally titled Boy Rents Girl, the film features the geeky White male teenager Ronald Miller (performed by Patrick Dempsey) who saved his earnings mowing lawns in the neighborhood in order to buy a telescope. As he is about to finalize his purchase in the local shopping mall, he notices his long-time crush and White cheerleader

Cindy Mancini (performed by Amanda Peterson) frantically trying to exchange her mother’s wine-stained white-suede dress in the designer clothing store across from him.

Ronald impulsively decides to offer Cindy a deal: he will give her the thousand dollars intended for the telescope, thus saving her from her mother’s punishment and enabling her to purchase a replacement dress, under the condition she pose as his girlfriend for a month so he can become popular.

195 Using an additional lens of cross-racial signification, the school dance sequence particularly illustrates how once he has bought into this newfound lens of popularity and privilege, Ronald now possesses the entitlement to act however he wants. At this point in the film, Cindy has publicly dumped Ronald at school. Ronald is thrilled to witness he has remained popular at school even after he is no longer associated with Cindy and her popularity. When one of the popular girls asks him to the school dance, Ronald overperforms an image of popular bravado in accepting her invitation, claiming he has

“moves which defy the laws of gravity” (Rash 1987). However, back at home the next morning preparing for the night, he panics, having no true confidence in his ability to dance.

Just like his clothes, hairstyle, and popularity, he attempts to quickly co-opt a dance from the show American Bandstand as though it were a costume he could don just for the purposes of looking cool and being accepted among the new popular crowd he has literally bought his way into. After coercing his younger brother to turn the television to the desired channel, the television lands on a show during which two Black dancers perform a choreographed routine in their own spotlights. Both boys assume it is

American Bandstand. The brother even seems to immediately identify what segment of the program Ronald watches before leaving in a huff, resigned from his brother winning the battle of the remote: “Spotlight dance. Ultra new wave music” (Rash 1987). Ronald quickly imitates the dancers’ moves until he has executed them to the best of his ability before scampering off to his room to change. His brother reenters the room once Ronald has left, catching the end of the show describing the performance for what it actually is:

196 an African tribal dance called the African Ant-Eating Ritual (thus in fact not American

Bandstand), and breaks out in laughter.

As described by Thomas Hine in The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A

New History of the American Adolescent Experience, the program American Bandstand was “the weekday afternoon dance party program whose national debut in 1957 signaled the arrival of teenage culture in the mainstream” (2000, 246). As discussed in Act One of this dissertation, American Bandstand offered White suburban teenagers like Can’t Buy

Me Love’s Ronald Miller a means to learn current dance fads from Black bodies on the television set. Given its high ratings and popularity, the program inadvertently also further legitimized a cross-racial transference of hip virtuosic dance moves as performed by White bodies. Hine explains in further detail the racialized image of the program:

“Still, although the program worked hard to keep itself bland enough for all of America, it still had a distinctly urban look. . . . They didn’t look like delinquents, though they looked urban and ethnic, and thus faintly exotic to those watching from suburbia. . . .

This was a minor rebellion in itself” (2000, 247-248). However, in this scene, Can’t Buy

Me Love creates a comic gag by employing this exoticism: Ronald and his brother misread an African ritual on an educational network as a dance that could be performed on American Bandstand, illustrating their own lack of knowledge with Black vernacular dance trends and their naiveté in trusting anything they find on television.

When Ronald and his date arrive, he is clearly nervous to dance in front of the popular crowd. He briefly breaks away from his date and flees to the bathroom where he primps in front of the mirror, slicking his hair back and rehearsing his quickly memorized

197 dance moves from the television program. One of the ways this film further explores and embodies the White Man Dance trope is the quality with which Ronald faithfully adheres to the dance itself. Similar to the ways Tom Hanks’s characters from Bosom Buddies and

Big operate as characters disguised within other characters, so too is Ronald Miller still the nerdy outcast hidden within the guise of the popular boy archetype.

Regarding the choreography itself, Ronald does not adapt it to his own body or the type of song accompanying him on the dance floor. Without any clear confidence in his own sense of rhythm or improvisational moves, Ronald copies the moves exactly as observed as though the dance were an assignment to perfect. This also exposes the questions of ownership and dance moves, even those displayed on the actual program

American Bandstand. Ronald steals this choreography in order to further cement his own popularity just as he buys his way into popularity through purchasing Cindy as his girlfriend. As Shary argues, “[T]he overtones of prostitution and even slavery that Can’t

Buy Me Love uses to carry out its message of gaining true acceptance through self-respect and pride corrupt much of its sometimes sincere critique about the literal ‘cost’ of popularity” (2011, 576). This is a striking statement in light of minstrelsy, in which those living during the era saw White men who were at the time owners of slaves profit off of the moves of the bodies they already owned via the exchange of currency and labor.

As though preparing for an actual stage performance, a sweaty Ronald returns from the bathroom and approaches his date near the punchbowl while he drinks nervously from a flask and she waits impatiently to join her friends on the dance floor.

He finally complies, approaching the dance floor with his date. As she dances in simple

198 unassuming moves to the music being played on stage by an all-Black 1980s rock band,

Ronald initially stands in front of her without moving. He finally breaks out his new dance routine without engaging with his date in any embodied or interactive way.

The dance, choreographed by Jewish pop singer and dancer Paula Abdul, is simple enough in its execution. Ronald starts with a quick grapevine. He then raises his arms bent at the elbow along with each of his hands (fingers spread) next to his face as he slaps the air three times. Finally, Ronald swings alternating arms up and down in dramatic motions close to his sides. He then repeats this series of movements again and again. Although his date and the rest of the crowd are perplexed and perturbed at first, gradually the entire school joins him in a flashmob performance of the dance sequence.

When Ronald first performs the dance, one girl standing off to the side with her friend smirks at him remarking: “That’s bad!” Her friend responds with a vote of ableist judgment and sympathy: “Aw, he must be in Special Ed.” However, as this scene will make clear, when it comes to the ridiculing of teenagers, it is the position in the school’s hierarchy that the person who watches and judges the dance possesses that matters.

Ronald’s date initially joins him in performing the dance mostly to cope with her embarrassment at being his date, evidenced by the awkward expression on her face and the stilted of her movements. A crowd slowly forms around him speechless and stunned. One of the jocks, however, expresses the comic commentary offered in this scene most aptly: “That’s bizarre! However, if the Ronster’s doing it, it must be new!”

(Rash 1987). Seemingly familiar with how quickly and suddenly dance trends become popularized in American youth culture; the and his date also join Ronald in his odd

199 dance, thus launching a true grapevine effect. Soon, the entire crowd performs the dance, solidifying Ronald’s popularity even further. Interestingly, the only person in the popular crowd who does not join in is Cindy, who has gradually become disgusted (seen in this scene largely through her disdainful facial reactions to the scene) by how easily her friends can be convinced of Ronald’s superior status.

The scene ends in a comic move, as the last followers seen joining Ronald are the two girls who first scoffed at him. The camera gradually moves to the geeks, Ronald’s old friends he has abandoned in his quest for popularity who sit imprisoned and dejected in their seats on the bleachers. The geeks observe the dance, shrieking in recognition—

“The African Anteater Ritual!” (Rash 1987)—as they point and explode in laughter.

According to Shary in his article “Buying Me Love: 1980s Class-Clash Teen

Romances,” Can’t Buy Me Love was one of several teen films released at the time to explore class dynamics emerging from Reaganomics. Although, as he states, “[T]his delicate balance of politics and economics seemed designed to deny the devastation inflicted upon the working class by Reagan’s policies” (2011, 563), “the cultural re- evaluation of class in the Reagan era had already been evident in American teen films of the mid-1980s, which often posed their class conflicts in the form of divisive youth romances that inevitably trumpeted the economic rifts between teens only to offer an optimistic unification of these same teens by the end of their stories” (2011, 564).

This relationship of class dynamics is the focus of Can’t Buy Me Love, where it seemingly takes only a few small wardrobe modifications and Cindy’s high school clout to gain Ronald the popularity and privilege of the wealthy as well as membership within

200 hegemonic masculinity. However, Ronald soon becomes too addicted to his newfound popularity and privilege to pay much attention to the girl of his dreams even after he has attained her affection. Although this egotism causes Cindy to eventually “out” their arrangement to the popular crowd during a New Year’s Eve party, thus confiscating his status and privilege with a blink of an eye, the film still ends on a happy note as Ronald and Cindy ride off on his lawn mower into the sunset.

Can’t Buy Me Love offers an interesting example through which to understand the concerns emerging from the teenager-centered films of the 1980s as they intersect with the White Man Dance trope. In this film in particular one finds the commodification of popularity through a capitalistic economy. Initially Ronald discovers he can literally buy his way into the hierarchy of high school popularity through the ownership of Cindy using the currency of money. A close second, Ronald learns how to dance in order to further his guise of being an actual popular teenage boy in high school by co-opting dances from a television set, an object also connected to racial and class status. Certainly, one witnesses the layers of “stealing” the dance from Black dancers most likely subjugated in contemporary American society but again able to be stolen from in order to climb higher on the ladder of a White hierarchy the Black performers themselves are most likely unable to reach.

“You Know This Boogie Is For Real30”: Ultimate White Boy Napoleon Dynamite Walks the Performative Tightrope Between the Sincere and the Cynical

The year 2004 was ushered in from the jump with surprisingly not one but two dance films (mainstream films in which dance functions as the central theme of the

30 “Canned Heat,” (1999).

201 narrative) produced in Hollywood: You Got Served, released in theaters on January 30, and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, released in theaters on February 27. The year would end with another attempt at a hit in the dance film category: the American adaptation of

Shall We Dance? starring Richard Gere and . However, just before these films were released, another film would sleepily emerge and transcend the popularity of all the others, one formed largely due to the integral way dance is employed in the finale.

Although not initially conceived and perceived of as a dance film like those preceding it, this film would become a cult classic, a viral sensation, and inspire the name of a particular archetype of geeky-turned-triumphant White male dancing informing many future dance sequences both sincere and parodied: Napoleon Dynamite (Hess 2004).

The popularity of Napoleon Dynamite, the film as well as the iconic finale dance sequence Napoleon (performed by Jon Heder) performs, cannot be easily refuted. The

Internet Movie Database provides a “Connections” section on its entry for the film offering quite a substantial list of other popular cultural products referencing, spoofing, and featuring elements of the film (2004). A significant number of those products listed reference the final dance sequence. Additionally, one only needs to direct his/her browser to YouTube to search “Napoleon Dynamite dance” to observe the number of fans who have reenacted the dance sequence, whether for their own personal enjoyment (as well as the intended enjoyment of their intimate and anonymous viewers), a public performance, or in order to pass down their Napoleon Dynamite chops as an authentic imitator of dance moves in the form of tutorial videos teaching the viewer step-by-step how to recreate the performance on their own. The most popular tutorial offers its own names for each of

202 Napoleon’s signature moves, such as Walk Like an Egyptian; Crouching Llama, Hidden

Emu; and Greedy Buffet Patron, to name a few (Albino Blacksheep 2007). For several years following the film, a Napoleon Dynamite festival was held in Napoleon Dynamite’s hometown, including a “Tater Tot Eating Contest and a Tetherball Tournament” and a

“Moon Dance contest” (Simon 2005).

The film has also produced a seemingly endless amount of merchandise celebrating the film, even spawning a term coined “The Napoleon Dynamite Problem,” used to describe a phenomenon in which quirky films like Napoleon Dynamite were difficult for researchers and critics to predict whether a particular viewer would like a film (Kottke 2008). This “problem” could be born from the actual facts of the commercial success of the film itself. Napoleon Dynamite was filmed with a very modest budget of $400,000 to a limited initial release. Although the film received mixed reviews from critics ( gave the film one and a half stars and gave the film a C-), Napoleon Dynamite grossed almost forty-five million dollars less than a year after its release. Originally paid a thousand dollars for his role as Napoleon

Dynamite, Jon Heder later renegotiated his earnings to receive a cut of the unexpectedly large profits from the film (.com 2004).

Certainly not the first film to explore the trope of the awkward dork miraculously reemerging as a hero through a performance, Napoleon Dynamite’s employment of this trope sparked a resurgence of excitement and amusement in the

American imaginary, one constructed with new unexpected parameters. Perhaps most revealing is what the popularity of this iconic dance sequence reveals regarding the

203 ideological relationship between dance and teenaged White male not typically associated with “good” dancing. What is it about Napoleon Dynamite’s dancing, intersecting with whom the audience understands Napoleon to be as a character, that is so funny, so striking, so inimitable, so enjoyable, and thus so unforgettable?

To consider this question, I chose to read the film as a whole while focusing particular attention on the final dance sequence performed in the film through a lens of gender performativity and performance studies. To that end, I will read this sequence using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Erving Goffman’s distinctions of cynical versus sincere performances, and Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, arguing Napoleon Dynamite (the film as well as the character) straddles the performances of the sincere and the cynical as well as the masculine and the feminine in order to subvert ideological norms experienced by the general American public.

Napoleon Dynamite is an awkward White sixteen-year-old male who lives in the small town of Preston, with his older brother Kip and their grandmother. Kip is in his early thirties and unemployed, spending most of his time writing women online in

Internet chat rooms and desiring to be a cage fighter. Although Napoleon seems inexpressive and sullen, he almost always verbally expresses himself in a whine, telling many grandiose stories about himself to the popular kids who regularly bully him. Early in the film, Napoleon and Kip’s grandmother injures her coccyx in a quad-bike accident.

She asks their Uncle Rico, who lives in a camper and occupies himself by making home videos of himself throwing footballs, to take care of the boys while she recovers in the

204 hospital. Not long after arriving, Uncle Rico and Kip start a get-rich-quick business in the neighborhood.

Napoleon befriends Pedro, a new Hispanic student who has immigrated from

Juarez, Mexico, and Deb, another awkward teen saving money for college by selling boondoggle keychains and glamour portraits. Uncle Rico’s schemes in the neighborhood often cause Napoleon even more social embarrassment because it often leads to Rico spreading false rumors about Napoleon to others. Put simply, Napoleon is rejected everywhere, both by the popular kids at school as well as by his family. The only people it seems he can trust are also outcasts and othered, such as the shy Deb and Pedro, seemingly the only non-White student in the school.

Despite the fact he is not popular, Pedro decides to run for class president against

Summer, one of the most popular girls at school. Napoleon generously offers his assistance with Pedro’s campaign. On the day of the elections, each candidate is required to give a speech as well as perform a skit. Pedro and Napoleon have not been informed about the skit requirement. In order to help Pedro win the election, Napoleon decides at the last minute he will perform a dance on Pedro’s behalf. The dance, to be further explored later in this section, is a triumph, winning Pedro the election (along with a standing ovation for Napoleon), and Napoleon Deb’s romantic affections.

The Comic Power of the Abject As Other

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines the abject, arguably her most influential theory in psychoanalytic literature, as “something so vile that I do not recognize it as a thing . . . I must violently reject it in order to assert myself as ‘I,’ and

205 ‘Not that’” (1980, 2-4). Kristeva distinguishes the abject as being separate from the object: “Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion. They are clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic, articulated by negation and its modalities, transgression, denial, and repudiation” (1980, 6). In her article titled

“Understanding Abjection: An Analysis of the Monstrous-Feminine in the Art of Cindy

Sherman,” Megan Karius explains Kristeva’s abjection as “allow[ing] one to separate themself [sic] from what they are not. Kristeva asks, ‘How can I be without border?’ She contends we cannot exist without using the abject to draw a border. The abject is what must be repulsed because it cannot be assimilated” (2011). The abject, then, often represents itself via the grotesque, and through this rejection of the grotesque the subject understands the border between the body and the self.

I read Napoleon Dynamite’s development of the abject in the construction of

Napoleon’s character as one of the film’s most consistent comic tools. This development is two-fold: If one looks at Napoleon through a Kristevian lens of the abject, one can read

Napoleon as an abject entity—he is constantly rejected and excluded, and as a figure he can be read, according to Kristeva, as “the one by whom the abject exists”: “a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing” (1980, 8). Further, Napoleon consistently makes choices inevitably excluding him even further from the social environment of his daily school life. For example, when the rest of the students play basketball together, Napoleon opts instead to play tetherball by himself. At lunch one

206 day, Napoleon stuffs tater tots in a small zipped pocket on the side of his stretchy pants, just one of the many clothing choices that could read to the audience as being comically

“uncool.” When the popular boys ask Napoleon what he did during his summer vacation,

Napoleon tells wild stories about hunting for wolverines even as it is clear from the boys’ facial expressions they clearly do not believe the far-fetched tale. Napoleon responds to each of the boys’ questions with a whine as though detesting being asked anything at all.

In these ways Napoleon can be read as embodying the “one by whom the abject exists.”

Interestingly, unlike Can’t Buy Me Love’s Ronald Miller, Napoleon makes clear choices about his relationship to the borders between himself and others at the expense of his own popularity and inclusion in a social group.

Another way in which Napoleon can be read as abject concerns Napoleon’s relationship to food loathing (a distinct element addressed in Kristeva’s theory of the abject). Interestingly, Napoleon’s relationship to loathing remains inconsistent with his bodily rejection of the outer world. The film explores Napoleon’s relationship to the abject through three separate scenes dealing with food. After Napoleon meets Pedro in the cafeteria during lunch, he asks Pedro if he can have his tater tots. When Pedro acquiesces, Napoleon promptly zips them into the side pocket on his pants. During a class later that afternoon, Napoleon stealthily unzips the pocket, carefully removing one tot and proceeds to while everyone quietly reads. A classmate nudges Napoleon, demanding he give him a tot. Napoleon declines twice, exclaiming he is “freaking starved” (Hess 2004) and has not had anything to eat all day, even though the audience previously witnessed a scene whereby Napoleon ate a full cafeteria lunch. The classmate

207 responds to this refusal by angrily slamming the bottom of his sneaker into Napoleon’s pants pocket, causing the tots to fall out and onto the ground. Napoleon again responds with a stoic face and a whiny explosive voice: “God! Gross! Freaking idiot!” (Hess

2004). In this scene, it is as though Napoleon physically imagines what it would taste like to eat the tots touched by the bottom of the boy’s combined with their contact with the classroom floor.

His reaction to the tot experience is the adverse reaction he has to drinking egg yolks and eating sandwiches covered in flies, a lunch provided to him during a one-day job at a farm to return hens to their cages. Although Napoleon gags initially when drinking the yolk and does not rush to eat the sandwich covered in flies, he consumes both without the complaints evoked in the earlier scene. Similarly, near the end of the film, when Napoleon samples milks for defects in a competition for the Future Farmers of America (FFA), he reports on the accurate defects to the judges with a kind of deadpan delivery (similar to comic techniques earlier established by Steve Carell and Buster

Keaton), displaying no outward averse reaction to drinking defected milk.

These examples further illustrate Kristeva’s contention regarding the abject and loathing: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in- between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1980, 4). Within the context of the group dynamic, Napoleon is abjected from and abjects others. When he is called to perform a task in alignment with his own sense of his skills such as the milk competition, he fits within the hierarchical order. The comic hinge, then, is developed through the expected

208 audience’s relation to the abject as well. Napoleon is disgusted by the mere notion of tater tots making contact with the floor even though he does not eat them whereas he seems to easily consume that which it seems most would reject (defected milk and liquid egg yolks covered in flies). The overexpression of his complaints revealing his disgust (i.e., the embodiment of Kristeva’s formulation of the abject) combine with his lack of accompanying facial affectation and/or gestural expression to construct an unusual yet comical character for the film.

In addition to Napoleon’s hybridized performativity of the abject constituting one lens through which the audience may view and read the final dance, Napoleon also can be seen straddling the fence between the cynical and sincere performance of his reality as first defined by anthropologist Erving Goffman in his text The Presentation of Everyday

Life (1959). Ultimately, I will argue one can read an instability regarding Napoleon’s own relationship to his performative role throughout the film, which extends to how the dance can be viewed as well. This connects to the earlier reading of Napoleon through

Kristeva in that the abject represents the border between what does and does not constitute the self. Goffman addresses another duality of the self through which one can read Napoleon Dynamite, e.g., the extremes of an individual’s belief or lack of belief in his own “real” performance: “At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act . . . At the other extreme, we find that the performer may not be taken in at all by his own routine” (1959, 61). Goffman uses two terms from the English vernacular, “cynical” and “sincere,” to code these two relationships the performer might have to his/her own performance: “When the individual has no belief in his own act and

209 no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term ‘sincere’ for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance” (1959, 10).

Another way one can read the Napoleon Dynamite character is via Goffman’s theories regards the liminality between cynical and sincere. As mentioned earlier, the audience (both the viewers of the film and the students in the school) has already been witness to Napoleon’s tendencies towards spinning wild tales and constructing seemingly grandiose images of himself throughout the film. When three popular kids encourage

Napoleon to tell his story about fighting off fifty wolverines in order to protect his cousins, it is clear from the subtle smirks their faces bear that the popular kids remain unconvinced and mock him. They do not rush to be further convinced but play along instead, asking Napoleon questions as if merely seeking more evidence of Napoleon’s heroic efforts as they barely stifle laughter. As Napoleon tells his story, he indicates through his answers how unsurprising his actions were, as when he blurts out, “What the heck would you do in a situation like that?” and “A freakin’ 12 gauge. What do you think?” when asked about his gun, as though Napoleon deemed the questions themselves obvious and unnecessary (Hess 2004).

Although Napoleon tells this story as he tells anything else—wearing a sullen open-mouthed face and the tone of a whine indicating he is bothered and impatient with the conversation just as it has begun—a curious aspect involving Napoleon’s performativity is his eye contact. One would possibly expect engaged facial and verbal expression of a far-fetched story from one seeking approval from a convinced audience.

210 In contrast, however, Napoleon’s voice is whiny but unemphatic in his telling of the story, his eyes remaining closed. Typically, it is through the performing of the face, the voice, and the hands that an audience believes in the sincere performance of the storyteller (or at least believes the performer believes in his own narrative). In those expected cases, the hands perhaps gesture more frantically, the eyes open wider and connect more directly with their audience, and the voice becomes more intent on the act of persuasion. The comic effect then could be read as hinging upon whether the audience believes in Napoleon’s own performance of the . Certainly along with his lack of eye contact and affect, the physical embodiment of Napoleon—dressed in snow boots, high-waist , and a t-shirt; with a full head of curls; a slight slouch in his shoulder; and lacking a muscular physique—does not embody the figure most often associated with the story he has just finished telling. This is one of the earliest examples introducing a possible reading of Napoleon as straddling the performative fence of sincerity.

As the film progresses, however, Napoleon’s deliberate choices around his own performance become clearer to the audience. It is as though Napoleon embodies a similar liminal space as Hanks’s Josh Baskin in Big when expressing the transitional stage of youth. For example, when Napoleon first befriends Pedro, he begins to spin another grandiose image in order to impress him, telling Pedro: “There’s like a buttload of gangs at this school. This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I’m pretty good with a bow staff” (Hess 2004).

However, when Pedro outdoes him with his bike, a Sledgehammer, Napoleon begins to weave back and forth from his performance of grandiosity to his actual feelings

211 about his position in the school. In other words, through his relationship with Pedro, one could read the shift between cynical and sincere performances as he begins to display a new kind of vulnerability and honesty. Another example of Napoleon’s surprisingly sincere performance of his self worth occurs when Pedro asks Napoleon why he has not asked a girl to the dance. Napoleon exclaims insecurely: “Nobody’s gonna go out with me! [Because] I don’t even have any skills! You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills” (Hess

2004). Despite this confession, Napoleon’s unaffected performance remains the same, lending Napoleon’s character an interesting kind of ambivalence and lack of clarity.

Further, it could be argued Napoleon’s exclamation “Nobody’s gonna go out with me!” can be viewed as an illustration of Goffman’s cynical performance as the character no longer believes in the performance he delivers throughout the film.

The third aspect of Napoleon’s character informing how the dance can be read as a subversion of ideological performance is Napoleon’s racialized gender performativity.

In Bodies That Matter, gender theorist Judith Butler addresses the performativity of sex, stating performativity is not “a singular ‘act,’ for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it requires an act-like status, in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition” (1993, 12). Although Napoleon could be widely read as socially awkward, Napoleon still subscribes to performative gender norms. Most particularly, Napoleon is under-expressive in face and body, one of the expected performatives of male gender as established earlier through Kimmel’s masculinities studies scholarship of the White stoic male. Although Napoleon does not

212 often express outward desire for girls, he is shown throughout the film as believing he needs to attract the attention of girls. Instead of directly asking a girl to the school dance, for example, Napoleon draws a portrait of a girl he has his sights set on, writing on the back of the picture: “There is a lot more where this came from if you go to the dance with me” (Hess 2004). In other words, he does not represent as an unmasculine man like

Pretty in Pink’s Duckie, over-eager and hyper-expressive in gender performatives.

However, interestingly, when Napoleon visits a store to choose a suit to wear for the dance, Napoleon chooses a three-piece suit clearly displayed on a female mannequin, one Napoleon is vocally demonstrably excited by. This reiteration of gender, a boy finding a gender-normative suit for a school dance, combined with the display of that suit on a mannequin with a female head, enacts a similar performative subversion Butler explores in Bodies That Matter: that through the reiteration of gender performance,

“occasional spaces [where] those killing ideals of gender and race, are mimed, reworked, resignified” (1993, 84). In other words, it is through the combination of gender performatives traditionally read as both male and female as expressed from Napoleon’s

White male body, that gender has been reworked and resignified.

One more way Napoleon can be read in order to contextualize the final dance scene is through racial signification. Before the finale, the audience witnesses Napoleon rifle through random objects at a thrift store. Napoleon attaches a sword he has found around his belt loop just before his eyes alight on a VHS dance tutorial tape titled

Dqwon’s Dance Grooves: Get Your Groove On. From the picture on the front of the video, it appears as though Dqwon is a queer, African American male dancer, although

213 the image of Dqwon does not easily read as distinctly male or female. Napoleon brings the tape home and begins to learn the tape’s dance moves in his bedroom. When

Napoleon goes to the kitchen to take a break, Kip’s girlfriend Lafawnduh, a Black woman Kip met online, starts chatting with Napoleon. After Lafawnduh learns of

Napoleon’s dancing (and conceivably heard Dqwon’s voice through Napoleon’s bedroom door left slightly ajar, she gives him a mixed tape from a friend, a tape Napoleon later uses for the finale.

The actual dance Napoleon performs subverts gender as well as race in its mixed embodiment. According to numerous interviews and the offered by the writer/director Jared Hess and actor Jon Heder, Heder danced to three different songs during the shooting of the dance scene, his moves spliced together on film to a single song in order to create the final dance performance. Additionally, Heder explicitly admits to having been influenced by many of the dance moves across racially signified male popular culture figures and programs such as The Backstreet Boys, Soul Train, John

Travolta, and Michael Jackson (Hess 2004). Even if the audience does not recognize the racial signification of the dance moves from the various pop cultural figures and texts

Heder borrows from, the performance can be read as immediately racialized from

Napoleon’s use of Lafawnduh’s mixed tape combined with his practicing dance moves from a VHS tape teaching Black pop dance to anyone wanting to “groove,” presumably a

White dancer. The dance is similar to the expression of his wild tales in that he dances expressively while his face remains flat, his mouth continuing to be slightly agape, his eyes open so slightly as to not see their focus or his oversized glasses obstruct the

214 audience’s view of them. Further, Napoleon wears the same black snow boots and high- waist jeans seen throughout the movie; the only difference is the “Vote For Pedro” shirt he wears. In many ways, it is the first time the audience sees Napoleon moving for a purpose outside of himself.

Napoleon’s face gives no clues as to whether one can read him as cynic or sincere, even during a theatrical performance on stage before an audience. However, although initially it seems as though the body will follow suit as it has throughout the movie in that Napoleon begins his performance with his head down and his hands in his pockets, the dance proceeds in a wholly unexpected way in terms of the various gestures of the body thus far performed by Napoleon. Once Napoleon executes a low jump to second position after thirty seconds of being on stage, his head lifts up to respond to a particularly dramatic beat in the music: this performance has greatly shifted from the performativity the audience has seen Napoleon embrace up to this point. Through the narrative of the film, the audience is aware Napoleon performed dance moves from a culture outside of his own—Dqwon’s—and might be secondarily aware, from the popularity of the groups Heder himself borrows from, of the mixed racial signification of figures such as Michael Jackson, John Travolta, The Backstreet Boys, and Soul Train. In other words, the subversion happens when this socially awkward White boy from a farm town reiterates the dances of both White and Black popular cultural figures in America throughout twentieth century. However, in this imitation of others, Napoleon retains his consistent muted facial expression the audience has come to expect throughout the film.

215 Napoleon also subverts the gender performativity of this collage of dance moves.

There are clear moves Napoleon embodies signifying a masculine framework, such as his stoic and flat rather than expressive and seductive facial expressions. At other times (such as at 1:04 in the video version of this sequence), Napoleon’s curved arms and wrists as well as his hip and pelvic moves also signify movements associated with femininity.

These two types of racial and gendered performativity embodied in the dance are layered over the performativity of Napoleon himself, which could be argued is neither traditionally masculine nor feminine but somehow straddles both. The very fact he is dancing “for” Pedro can be viewed as an effeminizing and racially subversive move as the figure of patriarchal privilege, the White male, is performing a subservient and servicing role for the other. This move is further complicated racially by which “other”

Pedro represents, i.e., the Mexican immigrant.

As the gender performativity can be read as subverted, one can at the same time read the finale as reinforcing gender norms through the heroic achievements of the dance itself. In typical Napoleon fashion, the tape stops while Napoleon continues to dance unfazed. Initially unaware of what is happening as if he were “bedroom dancing” for an audience, Napoleon continues to dance for a few moments before realizing he dances in silence. Similar to Popstar’s Conner4Real, it is though it is only at the moment of this realization that he becomes aware of the audience for the first time since beginning to perform the dance. The spell and the fourth wall broken, Napoleon immediately runs offstage. After a brief pause, the audience erupts in a standing ovation. By the end of the film, just like in Can’t Buy Me Love, everyone wins: Pedro wins the election, Kip leaves

216 town with his new love, and Napoleon’s love interest Deb joins him for a game of tetherball.

Throughout the film, the audience remains aware of Napoleon’s affections for

Deb. In the middle of the dance performance, the camera cuts to Deb smiling. Deb also initially leads the audience in the standing ovation. Heroism is implied in Napoleon’s willingness and vulnerability to perform this so-bad-it’s-good dance in front of the entire school itself. The film ends (unlike Pretty in Pink) quite pointedly with the underdog

Napoleon getting the girl. In other words, although one can read gender subversion throughout the film itself, the film ultimately reinforces gender norms with the film’s ending.

Why does Napoleon Dynamite’s dance remain such a powerful symbol in today’s

American imaginary? I would argue the film embraces the liminal space within which most identify. In “everyday life” we are less likely one of Goffman’s extremes, cynic or sincere, and more often negotiate a terrain somewhere in between, just as we are less likely comfortable reiterating merely the masculine or the feminine, the Other or the status quo. Napoleon Dynamite offered viewers an opportunity to identify with a figure socially awkward while White; a farmer attracted to learning Black vernacular dance moves and daring to wear a woman’s suit while being bullied on a regular basis.

Napoleon would even risk further repudiation helping out a friend in need (even if that friend was from the “foreign” territory of Juarez, Mexico). Although the film ultimately ends in a move that can be read as reinforcing hegemonic masculine ideology, the performativity employed throughout the film complicates how performatives of race,

217 gender, authenticity, fantasy, and the abject can be employed to create new, to use

Butler’s term, “occasions,” (1993, xxx) for the body to inhabit and challenge.

As can be seen with Napoleon Dynamite, a great deal has changed since the racializing tendencies of the 1980s employment of Black signifiers within White-centered

American teen films. In differing ways, Hughes’s films (and others like them) could be seen as employing Blackness as a signifier within gender and movement while largely leaving living Black bodies either reduced to remaining in the background or erased from the films entirely. The Blackness signified in this work often seemed to employ a simultaneous kind of mockery of Black embodiment while elevating White characters via that embodiment. It seems no coincidence many of these films were released in the same decade as this dissertation’s established origin story of the White Man Dance, i.e. Eddie

Murphy’s canonical sketch. In contrast, the ways Blackness can be read as signified in

Napoleon Dynamite, released almost two decades later, enacts a kind of intersection of

White and Black signifiers. We see instead Black-informed movement directly incorporated and credited in the narrative itself (e.g., when Napoleon explicitly buys an informative dance tape with a Black body on the cover, combined with his brother’s

Black girlfriend’s gift of a mixed tape for musical accompaniment) placed onto Napoleon

Dynamite’s wonderfully-awkward and eccentric body without the overly exaggerated facial expressions seen, for example, in the Duckie dance from Pretty in Pink.

Additionally, Heder himself as a performer is much more transparent with regards to the inspirations informing the actual choreography, noted to have clearly come from both

Black and White popular cultural movers such as John Travolta and Michael Jackson. In

218 the final section of Act Two, I will explore how music video filmmakers, in both contemporary film and the music video genre, employ Blackness as both a means to find and represent one’s own external and interior moving body.

219 CHAPTER VII

ACT TWO, SCENE TWO

“JUST BUMBLING AROUND”31: GONDRY’S WALLFLOWER, THE JUSTINS’ WHITE NEGRO, AND JONZE’S ROBOTS

“Everyone was dancing, of course, except for me32”: Michel Gondry, Mood Indigo, and What the Camera Can Teach Us About Wallflower Men

Michel Gondry, a French-born male filmmaker who rapidly gained an American following through his early work in 1990s music video and film, particularly after the success of his first feature-length film Eternal Sunshine and the Spotless Mind, has made a name for himself via the art of movement and animation (Harding 2017). Gondry is also responsible for the special effects “” technique that would later become groundbreaking in trilogy (Kiang 2014). As an auteur the fantastical universes Gondry creates through a mix of old and emerging technologies are recognizable to most viewers even slightly familiar with his work. I would argue

Gondry’s employment of those techniques within visual media could be read as a kind of choreography of the screen through his technical facility to animate not only the inanimate objects in his mise-en-scènes but also the human figures in his work, predominantly through exaggerated, pedestrian, and stylized movement. One of Gondry’s most well known music videos to employ dance as a central organizing principle occurs in the music video for ’s “Around the World,” originally released in 1997

31 Mood Indigo (Gondry 2013). 32 Director’s Series, Vol. 3 – Director Michel Gondry (Bangs 2004).

220 (Gondry 2014), in which he directed (with choreographer ) five different groups of characters: robots, athletes, disco girls, synchronized swimmers, and skeletons who dance together on a multi-level platform representing a vinyl record. Each character group performing a particular movement in unison represented a different instrumental line in the song. As Gondry said in an interview:

I was trying to go into an area where I feel unsafe to prove to myself I can do it. Dance and choreography, I had never done that, and I would see choreography that was boring and conventional and all about close-up as to me choreography should be about architecture and wide shot and geometrical pattern and not about putting your guts out. It’s about expressing shapes with your body without showing expression in your voice. (Bangs 2004)

This is the Gondry many audiences are familiar with, the technical wizard who de- personalizes his characters as he animates something unexpected like a bass line in a song, a plant, or a telephone wire.

In a documentary accompanying a collection of music videos and other Gondrian delights titled The Director’s Series, Vol. 3 – Director Michel Gondry, Gondry explicitly addressed why he decided to start playing the drums at fourteen years old:

I was very shy and I thought I would never be bold enough to have a date with a girl. If I would play a masculine instrument, it would make true this process. There was a party, they put this music on and everybody was dancing, of course, except for me. I noticed this girl was not dancing either. I was looking at her. Then it was slow and everyone looking at each other. I’m still miserably waiting on the side. My friend comes and says to me, you should go invite her to dance. I take my courage and go to her and ask her you want to dance? Guess what she say? No. I ask, why. She say, you’re so tiny. (Bangs 2004)

Although Gondry embodies an identity slightly outside the frame of this dissertation’s premise (Gondry is a French filmmaker who has directed many American films), this short anecdote connects with the White Man Can’t Dance trope in that it depicts the non-

221 dancing from the perspective of the mover himself, a filmmaker associated with choreographic material in his videos and feature-length films. Additionally, as Gondry admits in the above quote, his very intention for playing the drums early in his artistic career centered on the assumption that drums would be considered a “masculine” instrument and thus help him court women. Finally, Gondry very poignantly expresses the emasculation and vulnerability associated with boys being unable to ask a girl to dance, to approach the dance floor on his own, or those who have been rejected once gaining the courage to ask a girl to dance with them.

Until 2013, when Gondry directed as well as co-wrote the French film Mood

Indigo, an adaptation of Boris Vian’s 1947 French literary classic, Froth on the

Daydream, Gondry’s creative work did not appear to address this vulnerability he experienced while dancing (or avoiding dancing) as a young man. I argue the biglemoi dance scene in the film, both the dance lesson as well as the party scene in which the dance is performed, can possibly be read as an example of how White men might experience dance as it relates to ideological norms of masculinity. The majority of demonstrations of White able-bodied (non-)dancing men from popular culture, including television, music video, digital video, and film continue to perpetuate the comic repudiation of White men revealed in this dissertation’s opening discussion of Eddie

Murphy’s White Man Dance sketch from three decades prior. Mood Indigo is one of the few films over the last decade seeking to explore the pressures White men may experience with the social experience of dance. Therefore, I read the following dance sequences of focus in Mood Indigo through a lens of masculine performativity.

222 Mood Indigo: An Analysis

For the purposes of this section, I will begin with a summary of the itself rather than the adaptation’s source . Colin is a very satisfied and entitled White young man. He is independently wealthy, enjoys the culinary masterpieces of his Black chef Nicolas, and delights in concocting his own cocktails with his pianocktail, an invention creating mixed cocktails by hitting keys on a piano. One afternoon his best friend Chick, obsessed with Jean-Sol Partre (a wordplay on Vian’s friend in real life, the writer Jean-Paul Sartre), joins Colin for lunch, announcing he has fallen in love with Alise, Nicolas’s niece. During this encounter, Colin discovers Nicolas is also in love. Feeling excluded, Colin demands Nicolas set him up with another of his nieces. In order to ensure the success of this venture, Nicolas teaches him the biglemoi, a dance his niece thoroughly enjoys.

French actor , born of a Senegalese father and Moroccan mother, performs the role of Nicolas. Before the scene even begins, then, an immediate visual signification of Blackness intersected with Whiteness occurs as an audience witnesses a

Black servant teach his wealthy White superior how to perform a Black-signified dance in order to impress a Black woman. Further, Colin is asking to be set up with not just any

Black woman but one of Nicolas’s relatives. Similar to Can’t Buy Me Love, an economy is set up via the power differential between Colin and Nicolas given that Colin is the wealthy White male and Nicolas is Colin’s employee. The significance of this activity is further triggered by the fact the dance itself is performed in both scenes to a 1940 recording by of the Chloe. It is worth noting that in the

223 original novel, Vian does not specifically address Nicolas’s racial identity, which can be read as a choice by Gondry to intentionally signify this scene racially, perhaps offering an opportunity for the film to comment on the racial hierarchy of dance.

What is initially comically revealing about Nicolas’s lesson is the purposefully complicated technical-sounding jargon used to explain to Colin how the biglemoi should be performed; for example: “The biglemoi is all about interference from two sources, animated by an oscillation, in perfect synchronization” (Gondry 2013). Although the language is similarly constructed in the source novel, this scene combined with the added racial signification in the film can be read as a depiction of how White men experience learning how to dance for the first time, particularly when the motivation for the learning is being used to assert their masculinity with women. Nicolas’s answer to Colin’s question regarding why the dance is performed to such a slow beat seems also to speak to the complexity of partner dancing when Nicolas replies: “Because any faster, a boogie- woogie, say, the effect soon becomes obscene” (Gondry 2013). This line seems to also subtly and comically refer to the rock ‘n’ roll era of the 1950s explored in the beginning of this dissertation, an era when dance as performed by White teenagers at music concerts, for example, was considered lewd and dangerous, potentially leading to excessive acts of fornication. Incidentally, as Vian’s novel was originally published in

1947, the 1950s and its history regarding dance as sexual, decadent, and threatening was just around the corner.

Gondry does not merely depend upon Nicolas’s phrasing of the dance or how that phrasing is strangely interpreted through Nicolas and Colin’s bodies to explore the

224 tenuous but charged experience of men learning to dance, especially in order to appeal to women. In typical Gondrian fashion, he employs a combination of puppetry, rotoscopy33, and Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) animation to grotesquely elongate the limbs of his characters onscreen. According to an interview with visual effects supervisor Gad

Elmaleh, “[T]he legs were animated by the actors through rods linked to their feet.”

When necessary, the team used traditional animation, CGI, or other techniques to help smooth out transitions not fully achieved through puppetry (Strabol 2014). Gondry explores how a man like Colin (or perhaps even that fourteen-year-old Gondry being rejected when asking a girl to the dance floor) might view his own alienating body learning the seemingly incomprehensible art of dance.

In the biglemoi, the steps (choreographed by Blanca Li) are simple and easy enough to manage: step forward, step back, lift the leg, put it down, loose port de bra fifth en haut to second, swing the arms, etc. However, Gondry digitizes the scene so the viewer and perhaps the mover as well witnesses the legs elongate into skinny streams of liquid skin, not so much bent as curved, the upper body remaining recognizable as it struggles to adjust to all the squiggly confusion of the lower body attempting to support it. The combination of the actual upper body dancing on top of the digitally and physically manipulated lower body could be read as symbolizing the White male pressures of having to perform masculine behavior without a road map, being forced to

33 According to 3drender.com, “[H]istorically, a rotoscope was a kind of projector used to create frame-by-frame alignment between live-action footage and hand-drawn animation. Mounted at the top of an animation stand, a rotoscope projected filmed images down through the actual lens of the animation camera and onto the page where animators draw and compose images” (2001).

225 learn movement from a hierarchy of bodies, whether from men of color or the women they attempt to court, without possessing the easy keys of comprehension or the skills of execution.

When Colin attempts to execute the dance at a birthday party with Chloe, a woman he has just met, Gondry experiments with different notions of the male and female’s roles in this gendered exchange. As Colin and Chloe awkwardly try to decide if they will attempt the biglemoi, Colin says to her, “[T]o be honest, I learned the biglemoi just for this party. I’m just bumbling around.” To his surprise, Chloe responds, “[E]ven better. Let’s bumble around together.” Meanwhile Chick, Colin’s friend newly in love, physically tries to flee his partner Alise’s clutches, exclaiming, “I don’t have the body for it.” Alise replies, “[O]f course you do” (Gondry 2013). Even within this scene during which the Black bodies on screen could be read as experts, the teachers of this imaginary dance form imparting their knowledge and enthusiasm on the White bodies on screen,

Gondry seemingly subverts this dynamic through expressing the interior visualization of the strangeness of dancing with the external effects of puppetry and visual effects on the body merged with the dancers’ actual bodies. Gondry then furthers this gendered subversion via how the women respond to the men’s self-consciousness involving their imperfect or awkward dancing. Somehow, among all of this body queering and perversion, the dancers still end up being able to execute the dance and enjoy themselves.

In this case, both men still get the girls without ridicule or laughter regardless how flawlessly or awkwardly they execute the dance.

226 Humor as it intersects with social dancing is employed as a seemingly unexpected tool in these scenes to further connect with the men “bumbling” their way to a successful courtship and social dance experience, instead of humor intersecting with dance employed in order to repudiate White men further through parodic imitation as seen in previous analyses of Pretty in Pink or The Office. The camera focuses not on women watching with disdain as with Duckie in the record store or men rolling their eyes as with

Michael Scott in “Booze Cruise.” In Mood Indigo, the camera instead seems to focus not only on the dancers themselves but also depicts the bodies as they themselves might experience them within the embodiment of the dance. The women are not employed to judge, point, and chuckle, or even to sigh with exasperation at not being able to find a man who will agree to dance with them. Through a Gondrian universe, he seems to have found a way to build a fantasy in which no White man is a natural dancer (just as when he was a young teenager), but also no man is too tiny to be danced with.

Keeping Up with the Justins: Bieber, Timberlake, and Mailer’s “White Negro”

In 1957, Norman Mailer published an essay in Dissent Magazine titled “The

White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in which Mailer explored the ways young White consumers of jazz and swing music began to embrace and assume the semiotics of Black American culture into their own cultural performativity. As Mailer charts adeptly in his formative essay, the White hipster was born from an embodiment of coolness emerging from these Black musical traditions. Mailer addresses movement itself in relationship to this exchange, stating:

Movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis comes, whether of love

227 or violence, he can make it, he can win, he can release a little more energy for himself . . . For to swing is to communicate, is to convey the rhythms of one’s own being to a lover, a friend, or an audience, and—equally necessary—to be able to feel the rhythms of their response. To swing with the rhythms of another is to enrich oneself—the conception of the learning process as dug by Hip is that one cannot really learn until one contains within oneself the implicit rhythm of the subject or the person. (276)

The semiotics of hipness, born from the history of subjugation of Black people in

American culture, required an impression of survival, i.e., of “making it.” Although this is not something the average White man born into a position of privilege due to

America’s White patriarchal system need occupy himself with, American culture witnessed White bodies appropriate these intrinsically Black values within musical and dance traditions.

In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, dance scholar

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild furthers these ideas by situating them in a specifically dance technique context, arguing that the idea of hipness does not originate from the jazz age but instead from jazz’s own Africanist influences. She summarizes:

The coolness, relaxation, looseness, and laid-back energy; the radical juxtaposition of ostensibly contrary elements; the and double entrendre of verbal and physical gesture; the dialogic relationship between performer and audience—all are integral elements in Africanist arts . . . woven into the fabric of our society. (1998, 51)

As she thoroughly traces what she terms “‘the aesthetic of the cool’” (49), the techniques of the pelvic contraction, torso articulation, percussive movements, and syncopation associated with jazz vernacular dance originate from Africanist aesthetics and movement principles.

228 Two White male movers commonly associated with dance movement signifying a rhetoric of “cool” and also often accused by critics of appropriation are American pop singers Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake. In differing but parallel ways Bieber and

Timberlake’s moving images (both real and perceived, as constructed by the camera), especially as depicted in their music videos, are seemingly produced out of this long-held appropriation exchange of Black music and dance tradition by White performers. To explore this question of appropriation, this section will offer close readings of music videos from each singer’s repertoire carefully situated within each singer’s long career of borrowing on this type of cross-cultural currency.

Belieb Me, I’m Real: Justin Bieber and His Brand of Andro-Masculinity

During Super Bowl LI, the mobile operator company T-Mobile aired a commercial entitled “#UnlimitedMoves.” The commercial opens with Justin Bieber dressed in a tuxedo and bowtie, his face adorned with large black-framed spectacles. As classical music plays in the background, Bieber introduces himself as “Justin Bieber,

Celebration Expert.” Bieber then proceeds to take the audience through the evolution of touchdown celebration dances. His “history” includes the era “High Five” and

“Spike,” the contemporary “the Shimmy,” “,” “the Shimmy Shimmy Shake,” and “Unlimited Moves,” performed by White NFL Patriot tight end Rob Gronkowski and

Black former NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens. Bieber includes his own comically entertaining touchdown moves, a variation of “the ” he calls the

“Shimmiddy-Sham-Sham-Shimmidy-Shake.” The commercial also includes a young

White girl contributing her own twerk-inspired moves, to which Bieber responds by

229 facing the camera with a look of shock painting his face. Aiming to promote T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan, the video was posted to Bieber’s own YouTube channel with a description stating that Bieber “wants to check out your #Unlimited Moves” and will share his favorites of those posted on his account (Bieber 2017).

This video implies Justin Bieber is an expert in the history of White male dancing

(e.g., the caveman dances included in the beginning of the commercial) as well as reinforces his brand identity as an expert (as he is introduced in the ad) in dance trends performed by Black dancers (e.g., the Shimmy, the Shake, and the Shimmy Shimmy

Shake). The video offers an important intersection establishing Bieber as both a White male movement “expert” able to mock the White man dance trope and a White man fluent in both Black and White movement.

Bieber similarly straddles two worlds of gender stereotypes through his cross- gendered image as well: He performs with what could be read as an effeminate falsetto voice and feminine face while also demonstrating a masculine persona through his heteronormative persona: a well-defined upper body and his gendered pop music.

Bieber’s androgyny has been addressed elsewhere in mainstream culture. For example,

SNL consciously cast publicly-queer White female comedian Kate McKinnon to perform parody sketches featuring Bieber as a character in multiple episodes over the past four years (Saturday Night Live 1975-2018), and there remains a Tumblr account titled

Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber, offering a collection of selfies of lesbian- identified young White women adopting the singer’s signature style (2010-2018).

230 Bieber’s andro-masculinity seems even more highlighted placed in relation to the hypermasculinity of Blackness within his videos. In her essay titled “Growing up to be a rapper? Justin Bieber’s duet with Ludacris as transcultural practice,” Barbara Bradby states: “In an interview in 2013, Justin Bieber admitted that he was very influenced by black culture, which he sees as ‘a lifestyle, like a suaveness or a swag,’ but stated, ‘I don’t think of it as black or white’” (2017, 30). In the music video for the song

“Somebody to Love” as will be explored in the following section, I read Bieber’s moving body, juxtaposed with the hypermasculine bodies of his Black dancers, as creating a cross-racial exchange between two different cultural images of dancing masculinity.

“Somebody to Love”: An Analysis

The music video for the song “Somebody to Love” was released on June 18,

2010. It was directed by Dave Meyers who has directed music videos for White pop artists , P!nk, and , as well as for Black Pop and hip hop artists such as , Missy Elliot, Janet Jackson, and . Additionally, the choreographer Hi-Hat is a hip hop choreographer known for her work with musical artists such as Montell Jordan, Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Missy Elliot. The video includes, according to Carole Edrich’s The Joy of Dance, “some of the best street dancers in the world, including the Crew, the Beat Freaks, the Syrenz, Medea Sirkas, and B-Boy Fly” (2016, 146). The Poreotics Crew is an Asian American all-male dance crew specializing in popping and robotics. The Beat Freaks is a White all-female breakdancing crew. The Syrenz is an Asian American all-female hip hop dance crew.

Medea Sirkas, aka Demons of the Mind, is a Black hip hop dance crew influential with

231 such styles as strutting, , , and fillmore. Bboy Fly is a White breakdancer.

The song and music video also features Usher, a Black pop musician known for incorporating his pop style with influences of R&B, soul, and hip hop.

The video opens with a wide-angle shot featuring various solo street performers including one duet. The dancers perform breakdance moves and spins in their own contained spotlights. The spotlighted performers are gradually added and removed, their spotlights revealed in synchronicity with the beat. They fade out as Bieber cast in a central spotlight stands with his back facing the camera, dressed in hip hop-influenced attire of black boots, black pants, and a black hoody. His left hand curls into a fist extending downward while he raises his right bent arm upwards, his right fist in the air.

As he begins to sing, he pumps his right fist into the air as duplicates of his same body and stance appear in separate spotlights upstage on both sides of him. The duplicate

Biebers appear in a wider shot to the edge of the frame to make room for the addition of two other street dancers also spotlighted. The next frame features a close-up of Bieber’s face singing in profile framed by the two street dancers on either side of him in full body shots in their own contained spotlights. The frame widens again as Bieber places one foot next to the other, pivots, and widens his feet turned out to hip distance, surrounded by two dancers on both sides of him forming two diagonals upstage.

Now in a mid-torso shot, Bieber’s arms extend outward diagonally as he sings while a body’s mulatto-toned hand with white-painted nails (whose face the audience cannot see) embraces him from behind. After a brief return to the earlier shot of Bieber dancing among the street dancers, the video depicts Bieber dancing alone facing the

232 camera for a moment, disrupted by a young brown-skinned woman with aviator glasses grooving behind him. The woman disappears as Bieber hops and pivots to face away from the camera.

As the woman reappears and dances away from the frame of the camera’s lens, two muscular Black topless male street dancers appear upstage in their own smoky light, dressed identically in red and black plaid baseball , long dark boots, and red suspenders. They begin to breakdance as Bieber walks to and fro continuing to sing. The camera shifts to a dusty close-up of the physique of one of the dancers, highlighting the dancers’ muscular arms. Bieber continues dancing with the two men in unison for the next fifteen seconds of the video, at times closest to the camera, at times behind the two men, until one of the dancers kicks up a of dust from his boot they exit behind.

This is the first movement sequence in the video to reveal a complicated racial exchange between Bieber and Black dancing bodies. The names of these dancers moving vigorously behind Bieber are not easily found. Although the recent and regularly-updated publication of the website the Internet Music Video Database (www.imvdb.com) has made concentrated efforts to include cast and crew credits for music videos not easily found elsewhere, it remains uncommon for music videos to credit the names of backup dancers. Additionally, the camera aids greatly in giving the impression that Bieber is able to perform within the same athletic and technical style as the two men dancing with him.

Bieber’s body is draped in the clothing of hip hop, which possibly disguises his own less articulated muscular physique than those of the dancers accompanying him.

233 Another way in which one could read the signification resulting in this exchange is that the video incorporates these symbols of masculinities so Bieber’s youthful appearance and voice remain positioned in a place of White supremacy. Given that these dancers are not easily recognized and whose primary purpose is to support Bieber and make him “look good,” one could also read this exchange as an example of White appropriation of Black movement styles while the actual Black dancers labor without the recognition of the White stars who have borrowed these styles from Black bodies.

A similar controversy arose when critics accused the 2016 musical film La La

Land, largely inspired by many films from the Golden Age of musicals, of Whitewashing jazz. In the following, Jack Mirkinson addresses the ways in which La La Land emulates racially-problematic patterns of old Hollywood musicals in the article “‘La La Land’ might win an Oscar, but it’s got some bizarre racial politics”:

When musicals weren’t openly mocking people of color, they were fitting them in in the least obtrusive way possible. The most famous example of this is Lena Horne, one of the most iconic black jazz singers of the 20th century. She appeared in a string of musicals for MGM in the 1940s, but only in discrete solo scenes that could be easily snipped out of the films when they played in the South. (Horne would only get juicier parts in all-black musicals like Cabin in the Sky or Stormy Weather. Similarly, the —a black dance duo who performed some of the most dazzling numbers in film history—were a perennial feature in 1940s musicals—but never as actual characters. They'd show up, do their thing, and make their exit, leaving the white people to carry the actual plot forward. (2016)

Although certainly a Hollywood film would reasonably garner more criticism for the lack of prominent Black characters rather than a music video, it is a question worth considering regarding the placement of these dancers of color in relationship to Bieber especially given the history of hip hop emerging from Black culture. As Hilton Als states

234 in White Girls: “To say, as many critics have, that whites steal from blacks who originate important work in music or fashion is beside the point” (2013, 173). What seems more to the point is the possible ideological commentary arising from this cross-cultural exchange in which these Black bodies, connected to the bodies which were on the forefront of hip hop, are now, at least in this occurrence, nameless and meant to support the White body, i.e., the historical symbol of the borrower and the usurper. There remain many ways one could possibly read this exchange but none come to mind in which the Black dancers are seen as in control of this scene; instead, they feel more like , objects meant to physically decorate and accessorize the White figure in control in front of the camera if not behind the camera as well.

An interesting dynamic developing in this video not so easily spliced as was the case in early films like Stormy Weather is how the camera creates a visual merging of

Bieber with the Black dancers. It brings to mind another quote from White Girls, in which Als states in his exploration of Eminem, another White musical figure associated with Blackness: “For some artists—white as well as black—there is the sense that delving into ‘otherness’ allows them to articulate their own feelings of difference more readily” (2013, 173). For example, one camera shot at twenty-nine seconds into the video depicts Bieber giving the impression of the same stylized arm movement the two Black dancers perform. However, the audience cannot see the actual articulation of Bieber’s biceps and triceps as clearly as those of the topless street dancers behind him. Before the audience has a chance to examine the difference, the camera has changed to a new view, a close-up only featuring the head and shoulders of the three, enabling the audience to

235 perhaps imagine Bieber’s moves are just as flawless as the dancers. Given the dancers are a kind of visual decoration for the singer, what does it mean that the camera has blended them in this way, especially given their physical makeup is so different from one another?

The next shot accentuates the feet of the two dancers, which the audience can recognize because they are wearing a different boot than Bieber but again extends the audience’s impression Bieber performs the same thing outside the camera’s view. Many moments exist within this sequence in which Bieber performs his own short-lived hip hop moves alongside his backup dancers but the camera does not stay on Bieber long enough to require the same level of movement expertise from Bieber as that of the two men. Why does the camera feature Bieber in juxtaposition with these two dancers this way? Is it a necessity of the backup dancer to labor more than he who controls the scene? In what way does Bieber’s less articulated and physically-enacted movement relate to earlier notions of White American masculinity as immobile or stoic as expressed earlier in this dissertation by Michael Kimmel? Does the camera’s depiction of brief impressions of

Bieber’s moves highlight the stoicism as a traditional expectation of White American masculine values? To further this line of questioning, how does this image of Black bodies laboring for the White male extend the racialized economy witnessed throughout

American history, traveling back to the eras of slavery and minstrelsy?

The video continues with a similar type of construction, this time with Bieber dancing in unison with the two all-female hip hop crews, performing the same move in concert with one group then the other. As he pushes them away, they stylistically move

236 their bodies away from him in response, seemingly as if to establish him as the gatekeeper of the movements promoting him as in charge of these performers. The female hip hop dancers exit.

Usher enters the frame at this point of the video also dressed in all black and wearing dark . To his left, a group of Asian female dancers dressed in black as well hold open pink and black Asian fans. As Usher glides in circles next to them, the

Asian dancers move within their accents of pink fans, hot pink lipstick, and pink and black sneakers. Usher continues to dance with the group, gravitating towards the center of the shot while the women surround him arcing their fans toward him. The dancers for the most part occupy spatial positions below Usher, often dancing on bended knees beneath Usher’s standing form.

The video continues with this cross-cultural borrowing of Asian and Black signification. However, it is important to also make clear that even the representation of

Asianness is largely in service of Blackness, given the performers who represent the

Asian symbols in this video also identify as hip hop dancers. This is particularly interesting given Asia’s own well known cross-cultural exchange with hip hop culture

(Loo 2017). The next sequence of the video depicts an all-male Asian American hip hop crew dancing behind Bieber. The video briefly revisits the fan dancers in this sequence as they dance with Usher again. As the video gradually opens out to include more brightly lit shots, the setting further contributes to the hip hop aesthetic, set in some type of industrial space with metal walls and parallel light fixtures ending just above the performers’ heads. At the end of this sequence, the crew breaks away from the middle of

237 the room to briefly highlight the strut of Black actress and musical artist Kat Graham, known mostly for her role as a witch in the teen drama The Vampire Diaries.

A ball of fire creates the next transition as Bieber dances in a room filled with flames. This sequence continues with a hip hop crew dancing in line behind him, their arms extending in different patterns. The crew is dressed in white with black masks concealing their faces. Bieber dances in front of a wall painted with the Chinese character for the word “love” in bright red. After Bieber briefly dances with the hip hop crew, they disappear, leaving Bieber and Usher dancing and singing together amid the fire-filled room of Chinese “love.” The rest of the video highlights the various dance crews, returning to the same stylistic production aesthetics from when the various crews were introduced in the beginning of the video, including other dancers jamming out to the rest of the song, interspersed with cuts returning back to Usher and Bieber singing together in the room adorned with the Asian character and the flames.

In the case of Justin Bieber, his White male body’s ability and execution to dance well appears for the most part to be a suggestion of the camera’s manipulation, one further developed in the American imaginary through the use of skilled dancers equipped in the Black-originated stylings of hip hop dance. In other words, Bieber’s hipness and ability to dance can be read as constructed through his association with Black and Asian virtuosic bodies. Interesting layers of visual signification regarding masculinity are represented in this video: Bieber’s slight impressions of movements; the hypermasculine

Black street dancers decoratively supporting him; the hypersexualized Asian bodies coded in pink fans, lipstick, and sneakers; and the Asian American breakdancing crews

238 all offering a supportive role to Bieber’s stardom. Bieber could be read as toeing the line between the dancing masculinity of Pretty in Pink’s Duckie’s overeager performance and

The Office’s Jim Halpert’s stoicism: he moves enough to be acquainted with the dancers accompanying him, but not so much he appears, like Duckie, to “try too hard” to win over the girl.

“It Don’t Matter if You’re Black or White”34: Justin Timberlake’s Racial Ambivalence

As the analysis in Act One, Scene Two discussed, White male pop star Justin

Timberlake has long been accused of appropriation of Blackness based on his acknowledged influences of Black music artists like Michael Jackson, Prince, and James

Brown as well as Black music genres such as soul and hip hop. Recently, Justin

Timberlake has come under fire for backing away from his Black-infused artistic interests to return to White masculinity with his new album titled Man of the Woods (Petersen

2018). These critiques address a similar controversy discussed at the end of Act One surrounding the ways in which Timberlake’s career blossomed after “Nipplegate” while

Janet Jackson’s was put on hiatus, a controversy reignited when he recently accepted an invitation to perform at the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2018. These conversations beg the question: As a White male was Timberlake able to pick and choose when he would don Blackness and when he would return to his “roots”? These controversies reveal how tenuous and complex cross-racial music exchange can be. This question and its ensuing concerns will be further addressed through the analysis of Justin Timberlake’s music video for the song “Suit & Tie.”

34 “Black or White,” Michael Jackson (1991).

239 Yet another one of Timberlake’s influences, particularly in the video of focus for this section, is one of America’s most well known White male dancers: Fred Astaire.

Although some may describe the aesthetic of the video for “Suit & Tie” as more influenced by Frank Sinatra than Astaire, I would argue the style emerges originally from

Astaire, especially given Sinatra was in fact influenced by Astaire himself (Levinson

2009, 323). Astaire is a particularly intriguing choice of inspiration as he is yet another

White male dancer accused of borrowing from Black artists. In America Dancing: From the to the , dance studies scholar Megan Pugh discusses at great length the Black-derived origins of Astaire’s dancing shown to the audience throughout his long dance film career. Not only did his resident film choreographer, Hermes Pan, learn rhythm tap in Tennessee from a local Black boy, even referring to his rhythms as

“‘strictly black’” (2015, 121) but Fred Astaire himself also learned to dance while touring vaudeville from a Black choreographer named Buddy Bradley who “specialized in teaching white customers popular black dance moves” (121).

“Suit & Tie”: An Analysis

All of these cross-racial music and dance influences come alive in Justin

Timberlake’s music video for the song “Suit & Tie” (Fincher 2013). Released on

Valentine’s Day, the video is directed by David Fincher, a White male and filmmaker known most notably for directing the feature films Fight Club

The Social Network, and Gone Girl, as well as music videos for , Michael

Jackson, and , among many others. Timberlake’s resident choreographer and artistic director Marty Kudelka choreographed the video. Although background on

240 Kudelka’s dance history is not readily available, he credits Black jazz dancer and choreographer Roger Lee as his central dance influence (“Meet the Choreographers”

2014). Jay-Z raps on the track with Timberlake. A group of backup dancers accompany

Timberlake, whose names I was unable to find.

The all black-and-white video opens with a shot of Justin Timberlake playing the piano. A champagne glass and a whiskey glass rest in front of him on top of the piano.

Based on the lighting through the assumed curtained window next to him, it appears to be daylight. As he yawns, the camera jumps to Timberlake lying down while gazing at the bodies of two women, their lower torsos draped in as their legs extend up and down with pointed feet. The camera cuts back to a close-up of Timberlake dressed in black while an unidentified woman massages his shoulders behind him.

The camera cuts back to Timberlake mixing himself a drink. He wears a white opened to reveal a white tank top underneath. The camera cuts to what now appears to be a stage setting. Two men wheel Timberlake on a bed backstage while he smokes and uses his iPad. The camera cuts again. Timberlake looks off into the distance while smoking, wearing slacks and loafers with his shirt now buttoned while a blond woman in a bra and dark pants plays a chess move next to him. As he leans forward to see her move, Timberlake removes the glasses from the top of his head. The camera cuts to Timberlake eating and laughing in a kitchen while Jay-Z in sunglasses and smoking a cigar sits on a leather sofa behind him, leaning his head back to converse with

Timberlake.

241 The next shot widens to reveal Timberlake dressed in a black tuxedo and spectator shoes standing backstage next to a showgirl in a feathered headdress and a sequined costume. She dashes out of the view of the camera’s lens. Timberlake coolly stares at her as she flutters away while he slowly smokes a cigarette. The smoke hovers in front of his face as he exhales it into the shot. He throws the cigarette on the ground and slides onstage before a ballroom with glistening chandeliers. Timberlake begins to sing.

Throughout the beginning of the performance, the video visually relies upon an intense contrast of black and white. Although barely perceptible, Timberlake struts and dances as he sings with an old-fashioned standing microphone backed by a full orchestra and conductor as well as a group of dancers. He performs Michael Jackson-styled foot- slides and lean-backs with his shoulders, which the camera catches in silhouettes. At

1:12, the camera focuses on Timberlake just long enough to depict him pulling the handkerchief from his pocket before the shot switches to an angle behind him and the backup dancers to illustrate the entire group arcing their handkerchiefs from identical pockets across and down the right side of the body in a half circle. Switching back and forth in camera view, the group dabs the handkerchiefs to their foreheads and tosses them over their right shoulders, completing the sequence with a slow shoulder shimmy-rotation around in another half circle, the right side of their bodies gradually meeting downstage.

The video now transports the audience to a scene where the musicians record the song in the studio, the camera employing several close-ups focusing on the Black guitarists, drummer, and music editor, all dressed less formally than Timberlake. The camera returns to Timberlake and the dancers with their handkerchiefs on stage

242 occasionally dancing in unison with Timberlake. The camera cuts back to Timberlake in the studio conducting the brass instruments. In the studio, Timberlake remains formally dressed so that in both the stage performance of the song and the studio performance, the way in which Timberlake is styled might call to mind such old-fashioned musicians or dancers such as Sinatra or Astaire. One could certainly question the difference of formality of attire worn by Timberlake versus the supporting roles of the backup musicians and the music editor, especially given that Timberlake is White and the others are Black. What does this choice visually signify about who is in control and who remains in supporting roles?

Onstage, the movements shown include more Michael Jackson-styled foot-slides.

The camera accentuates the move in a medium shot of Timberlake in profile, one leg bent in plié while the other leg extends in a tendu before Timberlake slowly brings the extended foot to meet the bent leg. Timberlake and his dancers perform simple jazz moves such as short lunges, kicks with pivot turns, etc. Similar to the way in which

Bieber’s movement was depicted in “Somebody to Love,” much of Timberlake’s dancing is implied via a shot including only his torso, suggesting footwork based on the shadowy glimpses seen thus far. When the camera cuts just below the waist, the viewer witnesses

Timberlake fluidly gestures with his arms, shoulders, snapping fingers, or vaguely sashaying hips.

Although one could argue this is unnecessary given the hypermasculine old- fashioned visuals of the video to include the use of masculine-identified signifiers such as cigars, whiskey, male camaraderie, and women portrayed and dressed as accompaniment

243 to entertain and entice the men throughout the video, the video depicts Timberlake miming gestures that seemingly further affirm his hegemonic masculinity at various moments during the video. For example, Timberlake performs miming gestures to represent the voluptuous woman’s body when he uses his hands to outline a curvy woman at approximately 2:50 of the video. In addition, Timberlake mimics heterosexual expression with subdued hip thrusts such as at 2:55.

Jay-Z’s entrance in the song furthers the tone established with the lyrics of the song. As Jay-Z begins to rap, the video seemingly reinforces a stereotype of hip hop videos in which scantily clad and physically suggestive women serve as the backdrop for rapper vocals (Frazier 2013). For example, at 3:17 of the video when Jay-Z enters the track and the video, a woman in high heels, , and a black bra stands with her feet parallel and legs bent, her upper body and face arched forward next to a microphone attached to its stand alone on a stage. As Jay-Z raps the woman tilts her head back, her hair sensuously following her in a circle above her head to land against her exposed back.

The camera immediately cuts to a layering of fleshy White female bodies, their arms and hands weaving in and out of one another on the floor of the stage.

The camera cuts back to the woman who originally danced alone on the stage but now stands behind the microphone with her hip hitched stage right she then arches stage left in a dramatic sexy moment. The next shot is yet again of unidentified women’s legs draped in thigh high stockings attached to suspenders and adorned in black high heels as the legs bend forward and back, their bra-attired chests lying on the stage, faces lifted to the blinding stage lights.

244 With brief interruptions consisting of Timberlake smoking and Jay-Z rapping, the video continues with what could be read as gratuitous shots of the one woman dancing with the microphone much like a traditional pole dancer might, the various bodies on the stage now arching their backs with their chests facing upward. Before the end of this sequence, the video includes a slow-motion shot of what appears to be a Black male figure in a hat, suit, tie, and suspenders, elegantly swinging his coattails fluidly behind him in circular motions forward and back while gyrating his pelvis. He stretches his suspenders in opposing positions. Like the women in this sequence, this Black male moving figure can be read through a similar sexualized coolness of the song’s lyrics. It is not until later on in the video it is revealed the Black figure is in fact female as she strips down to a bra like the rest of the sexualized women in the video. The video continues in this mode until it concludes with sexy full body shots of women, their faces hidden as they arch their backs on a stage filled with water juxtaposed with varying shots of Black men articulating stylized movements in suits and ties.

The video leans substantially on Timberlake’s self-defined cross-racial brand image of Blackness and Whiteness via the musical tradition of R&B and jazz merged with the pairing of himself with Jay-Z. Timberlake signifies the elegance of Astaire’s

Whiteness and heteromasculinity by employing the refined black-and-white look of the video along with the 1930s style of the tuxedo (Astaire’s most recognizable sartorial image on a cinematic screen). The video can be read as revisiting this old-fashioned image by merging the sequences of Michael Jackson dance moves with the exploitation of both Black and White male and female bodies, a trope proliferating throughout hip hop

245 videos. Further, the constant backdrop of female sexuality helps further masculinize

Timberlake even while he dances as well as prevent the dialogue and bonding between

Timberlake and Jay-Z from creeping into being read as homoerotic terrain. I read these subtle tricks established by Timberlake’s own musical choices and previous brand image further demonstrated here via Fincher’s direction, Kudelka’s subtle choreography, and the totality of the mise en scène of jazz, liquor, cigarettes, and women as producing a

White male dancing image out of a history of Black bodies, dancing, singing, and seducing in order to maintain the power status of White masculinity.

As seen in the performers of focus throughout Act Two, Scene Two, whether a young man trying to impress a girl or a pop musician employing his brand identity in order to reach his fan base, these White male performers borrow from Black dancing and music practices and movers in order to seemingly affirm their own masculinity and embodied performance with relationship to dance. As almost all forms of White dancing in the American (and Western) imaginary have emerged in some way from Black vernacular dance forms, the cross-racial exchange is inevitable and virtually impossible to deviate from. It is what happens in the exchange itself, however, that I sense as providing a crucial mechanism in the evolution of the White Man Dance trope.

The impossibility of escaping Blackness in order to define oneself operating within the trajectory of the moving White male body is perhaps most nontraditionally addressed in the denouement of the contemporary film Her, written and directed by

White male filmmaker Spike Jonze, featuring White male actor Joaquin Phoenix and briefly starring the Black jookin dancer known as . For this final analysis and

246 interrogation, I will explore the ways Black dance, as performed in very brief sequences by Lil Buck and Joaquin Phoenix, is used as an objective correlative for the protagonist

Theodore’s interiority.

Spike Jonze’s I’m Here and Her as Cautionary Tales of Giving and Receiving

Once there was a tree…. and she loved a little boy. And everyday the boy would come and he would gather her leaves and make them into crowns and play king of the forest. He would climb up her trunk and swing from her branches and eat apples. And they would play hide-and-go-seek. And when he was tired, he would sleep in her shade. And the boy loved the tree…. very much. And the tree was happy. But time went by. And the boy grew older. And the tree was often alone. Then one day the boy came to the tree and the tree said, “Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples and play in my shade and be happy.” “I am too big to climb and play,” said the boy. “I want to buy things and have fun. I want some money.” “I'm sorry,” said the tree, “but I have no money. I have only leaves and apples. Take my apples, Boy, and sell them in the city. Then you will have money and you will be happy.”

And so the boy climbed up the

247 tree and gathered her apples and carried them away. And the tree was happy. But the boy stayed away for a long time…. and the tree was sad. And then one day the boy came back and the tree shook with joy and she said, “Come, Boy, climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and be happy.” “I am too busy to climb trees,” said the boy. “I want a house to keep me warm,” he said. “I want a wife and I want children, and so I need a house. Can you give me a house?” “I have no house,” said the tree. “The forest is my house, but you may cut off my branches and build a house. Then you will be happy.” And so the boy cut off her branches and carried them away to build his house. And the tree was happy. But the boy stayed away for a long time. And when he came back, the tree was she could hardly speak. “Come, Boy,” she whispered, “come and play.” “I am too old and sad to play,” said the boy. “I want a boat that will take me far away from here. Can you give me a boat?” “Cut down my trunk and make a boat,” said the tree. “Then you can sail away…. and be happy.” And so the boy cut down her trunk and made a boat and sailed away. And the tree was happy. ….but not really.

And after a long time

248 the boy came back again. “I am sorry, Boy,” said the tree,” but I have nothing left to give you— My apples are gone.” “My teeth are too weak for apples,” said the boy. “My branches are gone,” said the tree. “You cannot swing on them—” “I am too old to swing on branches,” said the boy. “My trunk is gone,” said the tree. “You cannot climb—” “I am too tired to climb,” said the boy. “I am sorry,” sighed the tree. “I wish that I could give you something.... but I have nothing left. I am just an old stump. I am sorry….” “I don't need very much now,” said the boy. “Just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired.” “Well,” said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, “well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.” And the boy did. And the tree was happy. —Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree (2014)

In Los Angeles, during a future in which humans and robots co-exist, robots

Sheldon and Francesca fall in love. On one of their first dates, Sheldon and

Francesca begin to dance at a rock concert. Humans, much larger and less wieldy than the robots, begin to push their way past Francesca and Sheldon to make their way closer to the stage, causing Francesca to fall. In the process of getting back to her feet, her arm, dislocated from its joint, falls on the floor and

249 therefore gets trampled on by the humans. Sheldon sacrifices his own arm,

detaching it from its socket and transferring it to Francesca’s shoulder. Sheldon

does the same for Francesca’s leg when he comes to her apartment after work to

find her on the ground missing her leg from the kneecap down. One day, Sheldon

gets a call and rushes to the Emergency Room to find Francesca in a coma.

Although the doctor initially resists, he ultimately complies with Sheldon’s

request to transfer his source of power to Francesca. She wheels herself home

with the wheelchair provided to her, holding Sheldon’s expressionless head in her

lap.

The included synopsis of I’m Here (Jonze 2010) details the love story between two robots, demonstrating filmmaker Spike Jonze’s claim in several interviews that I’m

Here was a loose adaptation of Shel Silverstein’s popular children’s story The Giving

Tree, originally published in 1964 (Silverstein 2014). Jonze considers the short film I’m

Here the initial meditation that would eventually come fully to fruition in the feature- length film, Her (Wickman 2013). In The Giving Tree, Silverstein tenderly represents the love a tree and a young boy have for one another. The tree willingly gives the boy whatever it is of her body he needs for whatever purpose. As the boy turns into a man, the tree continues to sacrifice her body for his adult needs until he becomes an old man and she has nothing left to offer but a stump for the man to sit upon.

Jonze revises Silverstein’s story in I’m Here to address the giving and receiving dynamic between two adult lovers, setting it in a futuristic world including both human and non-human figures. I find it revealing Francesca’s first accident causing Sheldon

250 (named intentionally after Silverstein) to sacrifice part of his body to mend hers occurs on a dance floor during a rock concert. Additionally, it is White men who cause Francesca to fall and White men who recklessly trample on Francesca’s arm. Does this moment offer a commentary on the hazard of White men’s entitlement and privilege? Or does this scene further a similar read performed in the analysis of Steve Carell in The Office regarding the White man dancer’s obliviousness to the world around him? Regardless, White masculinity can clearly be read as physically dangerous in this scene as White men cause direct damage to Francesca’s body and inadvertently to Sheldon’s more vulnerable form.

Jonze continues exploring these ideas of giving and taking in a futuristic world in his feature-length film Her. In the following analysis, I will explore three different moments of physicality in Her to address the ways in which Jonze extends these ideas further to engage or even reckon with ideas of race and gender intersecting with the body.

As the final analysis of this dissertation, I explore the ideas of give and take in this film to apply throughout the analyses thus far explored to question the role of give and take regarding dance and White masculinity. What is the give and take of gendered and racial ideology in contemporary American popular dance? What role does the White male dancer perform in regards to these exchanges?

Spike Jonze’s Her: The (Straight) White Male Dancer as Vulnerable

Similar to Jonze’s short film I’m Here, the feature-length film Her is also set in the future. It takes place in Los Angeles during some unknown time period clearly more technologically advanced than that of its release (Jonze 2013). In a way, the film can be read as shifting back and forth between ideas of the future and nostalgia. Theodore, the

251 protagonist of the film, is a professional ghostwriter of personal letters for his clients and the men dress in styles emerging from the 1960s where high-waist pants are the norm. At the same time, the inhabitants of this world play incredibly advanced videogames and can speak with their operating systems as if they were human. In the middle of a divorce,

Theodore is melancholy and lonely. He decides to download a new operating system modeled on human-to-human interaction. Theodore’s relationship with his operating system Samantha (who speaks to him through a device resembling a Smartphone) quickly becomes romantic as well as sexual. They fall in love.

Unlike I’m Here, in which the film focuses on a relationship between two characters of the same sentience, Her represents Theodore and Samantha’s relationship as a kind of interracial union between two very different types of entities. At the beginning of the film and their relationship, Samantha struggles with the fact she does not have a physical body through which to connect to Theodore. Early in their relationship,

Samantha tries using a surrogate to make love to Theodore as if she is Samantha—this woman is hired to sexually interact with Theodore while Samantha talks dirty to

Theodore through his device and earbuds—but Theodore quickly becomes uncomfortable. Ultimately, their bodily difference and lived experiences cause their love story to end. Just before Samantha terminates their relationship at the end of the film, however, the film offers three scenes leading to the film’s involving physicality and movement. This final analysis will explore what these scenes reveal regarding dance as it intersects with gender and race ideologies.

252 Nearing the decrescendo of their relationship, Theodore takes Samantha to the beach. While there, Samantha plays a solo piano recording for him, telling Theodore she hoped the song could replace a photo of them as a couple since a photo is impossible given Samantha does not have a photographable form. As the song continues to play, the film displays a narrative montage sequence where the viewer visually experiences their relationship. In one fragment of the montage, the audience watches Theodore enter what appears to be the terminal of a subway. Theodore sits on a ledge watching the street dancer Lil Buck jook and spiral next to an upturned to the somber tones of

Theodore and Samantha’s song (non-diegetically) as the device’s camera reveals to

Samantha what Theodore sees before him while he describes it to her in words the audience cannot hear.

Although this short movement sequence is only thirteen seconds long, I would argue it is a sequence layered with signification and importance, especially given Jonze’s role in helping to catapult Lil Buck’s career as a dancer. Further, Lil Buck’s journey to international success is comparable with the Lonely Island as discussed early in this dissertation, particularly regarding the way in which the Internet video helped Lil Buck garner recognition not afforded many of the uncredited Black dancers discussed in Act

Two.

Before discussing the relationship between Spike Jonze and Lil Buck, however, I find it important to note Jonze’s own contribution to movement on film. Jonze’s career in filmmaking began as a teenager when he photographed skateboarders and BMX riders for

Freestylin’ Magazine and Transworld Skateboarding. He also cofounded Dirt, a

253 magazine focusing on youth culture. Jonze directed and produced a number of skateboarding films, also cofounding the skateboarding company Girl Skateboards in

1993. However, it is through his work as a music video filmmaker in the 1990s for which he was first associated with movement on film, working with such musicians as Björk,

Kanye West, , Weezer, and Fatboy Slim. Jonze is well known for his choreographic music video of Björk for the song “It’s Oh So Quiet” (1995) and his video starring dancing in a hotel lobby for the music video for the Fatboy

Slim song “Weapon of Choice” (2000). In 1998 he danced in and directed the video for

Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” which was also performed live at the 1999 MTV Video

Music Awards. Jonze also included several dance sequences in his directorial debut

Being John Malkovich. He directed a dance video described as the first “live” YouTube video for Arcade Fire at the YouTube Awards ceremony in 2013. In 2018, he co- choreographed and directed an Apple commercial starring FKA Twigs (Wikpedia.org

2018).

Lil Buck, born Charles Riley in 1988 in , was raised in Memphis. He began dancing classical ballet at a young age and received a scholarship to study with the

New Ballet Ensemble in Memphis. He began jookin—a performed to buck music emerging from Memphis during the 1990s (Wikipedia.org 2018)—when his sister showed him some moves around this time. While studying with the New Ballet

Ensemble, the director introduced Lil Buck to the classical work of the composer Saint-

Saëns, which inspired Lil Buck to apply jookin moves to classical music compositions.

Damian Woetzel, former Principal at the New York City Ballet, was sent the link to a

254 YouTube video of Lil Buck performing his jookin interpretation of the iconic balletic solo “The Dying Swan” at a performance for the New Ballet Ensemble. Woetzel played the clip for the cellist Yo-Yo Ma in hopes the two could collaborate. Using Facebook,

Woetzel and Yo-Yo Ma were able to track down Lil Buck through his ballet teacher who first inspired Lil Buck to work with classical music (Alexander 2015).

This connection led to a life-altering performance. During Art Strike, an event where Lil Buck and other artists attempt to convince inner city schools to include art curriculum (Elgart 2016), filmmaker Spike Jonze recorded Lil Buck performing his “The

Swan” to Yo-Yo Ma’s live accompaniment and posted the video on YouTube. The video immediately went viral, turning Lil Buck into an internationally known dance sensation.

Performing similar moves to those included in Her, Lil Buck reinvented “The Dying

Swan,” the iconic solo choreographed by Mikhail Fokine for ballerina Anna Pavlova in

1905, in his interpretation “The Swan.” Lil Buck was also the choreographer for the music video for Black pop star Janelle Monae’s song “Tightrope,” which also featured her dancing. After the viral popularity of “The Swan,” Due to Woetzel’s invitation, Lil

Buck was artist in residence at the Vail International Dance Festival. He has also danced for Madonna and performed in the Cirque de Soleil show Michael Jackson: One. On the final episode of The Colbert Report, Lil Buck was the only dancer featured in a large celebrity ensemble singing the song “We’ll Meet Again.” Lil Buck also starred in a 2017

Apple commercial for AirPods, which aired during an NFL game between the Houston

Texans and the New England Patriots (Wikipedia.org 2018).

255 Unlike most of the White male dancers discussed in Act Two who attempt to extend the Black male body onto their own movements on camera, Lil Buck uniquely offers his own cross-racial body, choreographing Black street dance against the sonic background of Western artistic traditions of classical music and ballet. As The New

Yorker’s Joan Acocella describes in her profile on Lil Buck titled “Swan in Sneakers,”

As Lil Buck performs it, jookin’s fundamental move is undulation. Movements go through the body like waves—big, uninterrupted curves—and this is aided by large, gummy sneakers that must cost hundreds of dollars. Lil Buck dances on the sides and toes of his shoes, as well as their soles. But alternating with the legato movement is its opposite: fast, staccato footwork, as diced and precise as what you see from Irish step dancers or allegro specialists in ballet. Both of these, the legato and the staccato, are responses to the musical rhythms. That seems to be the basic thing—not so much the shape of the movement as its , its play with rhythm. (2013)

In his interpretation, which seems to additionally speak to the human/non-human element of the film Her into which Lil Buck’s similar choreographic movement is incorporated,

Lil Buck’s undulating embodiment of the swan seems to highlight the anthropomorphism of the swan in this context, a kind of half-creature/half-human aria less possible within the form of classical ballet as an audience member tends to typically witness this iconic dance text.

Given the solo originally was meant to depict “the last moments in the life of a swan” (Wikipedia.org 2018), I find Lil Buck an intriguing impression to add to the montage of Her, incorporated into the film’s narrative just as Theodore and Samantha’s relationship gradually decrescendos. As Theodore watches Lil Buck move he appears pensive at times and at others the audience witnesses the barest smile cross his face as though surprised by the choices Lil Buck makes with his body before him. It is a rare

256 moment within American popular culture in which one finds a White man contemplatively watching a Black dancer with silent awe and enjoyment. Theodore does not attempt to mimic Lil Buck’s moves in a kind of gesture towards minstrelsy nor does he marginalize the power of Lil Buck’s movement by passing him without a mere glance as one witnesses occur from the other White extras in the scene.

As Theodore is torn between his divorce and his challenging connection with

Samantha, I read this choreographic sequence as a kind of for Theodore’s emotional state. Lil Buck contorts and spirals his body tightly around himself, a kind of physical and psychological movement Theodore is unable to achieve for himself in his own life. I find the added layer of the explanation the audience cannot hear but watches

Theodore give Samantha as she digitally watches Lil Buck through Theodore’s device a kind of parallel for what White men seem to experience regarding dancing and the relationship between Blackness and Whiteness throughout American history. Just as there remains a distance between Samantha and the physicality of this moment, so too is there a distance between the White man’s body and the vernacular dancing history of

Blackness. When one extends this to think of the real world connections Jonze has fostered for Lil Buck through his recording and sharing of the helping to launch Lil Buck’s career (especially in comparison with the bodies included but not credited in Bieber and Timberlake’s music videos), one can explore even further the consequences arising from the recognition White men in positions of power and money can provide the Black dancing artists who have helped fundamentally contribute to their own brand identity.

257 Just before their relationship dissolves completely, Theodore and Samantha take a trip “together” in the mountains. In this setting, Jonze employs another montage illustrating Theodore and Samantha’s last true moment of union and happiness. Samantha and Theodore sing together while Theodore plays the ukulele as accompaniment to another one of their songs. He cooks for himself and pours himself a drink while

Samantha is again relegated to merely watching. Theodore then performs a small dance for Samantha while she sings to the ukulele in the background (seemingly non-diegetic at this point in the scene): he executes simple turns and jazz steps while wearing a , finishing with an imitation of a bit of choreography from Michael Jackson’s music video for his song “,” originally released in 1982 (2011).

What I find particularly vulnerable about this small dance sequence Theodore performs for Samantha is the way in which the dance seems to resist the White man dance trope. Only approximately ten seconds of film time, this dance sequence is even shorter than Lil Buck’s dance. Unlike many of the dance sequences visited throughout this dissertation, I find this dance more sincerely depicts the way in which a White man might actually dance in a natural kind of happenstance for one of his intimates.

At the beginning of the sequence, the viewer witnesses Theodore carefully place

Samantha and the camera/device she watches Theodore through on the table. Theodore places the earbuds in his ear and nods his head a couple of times before he begins to dance as though waiting for the right cue of the music to perform this dance for his beloved. If one knows the “Beat It” choreography well enough, one could easily recognize Theodore’s phrase of movement as sincerely attempting to imitate it. However,

258 Theodore’s movement is not technically perfect nor does he overperform it as if to, like

Friends’ Chandler Bing, mock himself in its flawed execution. He also does not perform it for a formal audience, thus receiving undeserved credit for performing this iconic piece of Black American choreography. Theodore seems to merely enjoy enacting this small moment of dance for Samantha just as any individual would, i.e., for the pure enjoyment of movement. Similar to the way in which he watches the Lil Buck sequence, Theodore seems to perform the movement based in admiration rather than in a form of co-optation addressed by the analyses of many of the sequences visited throughout this dissertation.

By the time Theodore wakes up the morning of their final night in the mountains, the shift in their relationship has already begun. Samantha begins to expand her interest in her own identity as a non-physical entity, speaking to hundreds of other figures at the same time as she speaks to Theodore through the device, who gradually grows more insecure in response to these new behaviors. In the following scene, Theodore is back at work in Los Angeles and takes a break to contact Samantha. The device responds with an error message: “The Operating System Is Not Available” (Jonze 2013). Hysterical and panicking, Theodore flees his office building and crosses a city street only to fall much in the manner of the old banana peel slapstick comedy pratfall briefly referenced at the end of Act One. He violently falls and spins before rising to his feet. As he falls, his glasses and his device get thrown a couple feet away from him. A number of passersby attempt to help him but seemingly embarrassed and anxious, he quickly grabs his belongings and briskly walks away. Soon thereafter, Samantha connects with him, stunned by

Theodore’s shortness of breath and anxious voice caused by the intensity of his fall and

259 his response to her unavailability. It is not long after this moment Samantha leaves

Theodore so she can more easily expand her identity away from the human world and inevitably their relationship.

Similar to the way in which I read the “Beat It” sequence as a remaking of how contemporary American film might depict White men dancing in a move away from the

White man dance trope, Theodore’s fall illustrates a move reminiscent of slapstick falls in physical comedy. But instead of using the fall as a comic tool with which to mock

Theodore, this fall is instead used to highlight the boundary between the human body and the vulnerability of Theodore’s character. Although physical comedy often straddles the violent and the comical, it is in the audience’s awareness of the intention of the physical comedian’s fall that results in making the fall less scary for the audience to witness. In this situation, however, Jonze uses the physical structure of the fall to instead highlight the vulnerability of the White male while remaining within a dramatic context. Unlike the

Lonely Island’s work then, particularly the Footloose parody in the feature film Hot Rod,

I read this scene as similarly interrogating the White male’s relationship between the limits of the body and the pressures of heteromasculinity but without relying on the engine of comedy or satire in order to form that commentary.

This thread of scenes representing the denouement of Her employs the body, physicality, and dance in order to ask larger questions regarding movement and the human condition. In terms of what Her contributes regarding cross-racial and gendered implications of White male dancing, I find these scenes complex for the questions they ask while also representing troublesome correlatives between dance, race, and gender.

260 For example, why is Black dance as performed by Lil Buck but also by Theodore in his

“Beat It” performance chosen to represent Theodore’s interior expressions in a way he cannot express for himself? The scene with Lil Buck is incredibly tender, a scene in which I sense Lil Buck’s curving and spiraling motions represent the complexity of grief and love Theodore experiences in that moment. Why is it a movement Theodore cannot represent for himself without employing a cross-racial quality? When Theodore does dance himself, why is it that he, like Timberlake, must borrow from Michael Jackson?

What prevents the White masculine male from carving movement from his own interior utilizing his own exterior expression?

However, unlike any film discussed previously with regards to the perception

White men can’t dance, I find Her provides a sincere exploration of White masculinity and cross-racial movement. Unlike the music videos previously discussed, Jonze specifically credits Lil Buck for his truncated performance in this film just as he did when he posted Lil Buck’s “The Swan” performance on Youtube, the occasion for which Jonze first became acquainted with Lil Buck, giving deserved attention to his Black body and performance as a known entity rather than capitalizing on his unnamed Black body.

As read through Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s foundational theories of Black signification and threaded through film and music texts interweaving a cross-racial exchange of Blackness and White masculinity, the White male dancers introduced in Act

Two are often placed in conjunction with Black music and movement lineages as well as significations of soul, rap, R&B, and hip hop in order to configure a new complicated exchange. At times, such as with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake’s “The History of

261 Rap” and in the Lonely Island’s SNL “Digital Short(s)”, this juxtaposition is often used to comically highlight White masculinity seeking to enhance its hipness via the lens of

Black identity. The 1980s saw an even more complicated and troubling exchange with examples such as those provided by John Hughes and others in the subgenre of the

American teenage film. These cases were not only troubling given the ways in which movement was explicitly borrowing from Black musical identity such as in Weird

Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, and Can’t Buy Me Love, but were also revealing regarding the confusions and questions surrounding racial and masculine identity. Justin Timberlake and Justin Bieber’s music videos can be read as exploiting

Blackness in order to elevate the hipness of their own brand identity within Black- inspired pop music genres often using the laboring male and female bodies of Black virtuosic dancers. This possible exploitation is more concerning when one thinks about the history of this racial theft traveling back to the minstrelsy era when White men imitated Black men in body and movement, profiting from it while its true creators remained the property of White men. Finally, in the performance of Napoleon Dynamite and Spike Jonze’s audiovisual works, we perhaps see a new image, one complicating what exchange can emerge from this intersection without the explicit employment of

Blackness as de-centered and decorated, but instead integrated into the White male body as a representation of the interior self both in the body as well as celebrated and recognized within the American imaginary.

262 CHAPTER VIII

EPILOGUE

“C’MON, WILL YOU DANCE, MY DARLING? AND WE’LL GET THERE YET”35

We caricature what we cannot define. We make obscene what we do not understand. —Shaelyn Smith, The Leftovers (2018, 165)

Jerry Maguire (JM): Here’s what I’m saying. This is a renegotiation. We want more from them, so let’s give them more. Let’s show them your pure joy of the game. Let’s bury the attitude a little bit, and show them—

Rod Tidwell (RT): Wait. You’re tellin’ me to dance!

JM: No. I’m saying—to get back to the guy who first started playing this game, remember? Way back when, when you were a kid? It wasn’t just about the money, was it? Was it? Was it?

RT: Do your job. Don’t you tell me to dance. (JM throws his arms into the air.)

JM: Fine. Fine! Fine!

RT: I am an athlete. I am not an entertainer!

JM: Fine!

RT: These are the ABCs of me, baby!

JM: Fine, fine, fine! [Jerry punches the air with his fists]

RT: I do not dance. And I do not start pre-season without a contract.

JM: Fine, fine! (JM kicks the air in front of him) Fine! (JM kicks the wall)

RT: Jerry, talk to me. (JM leans on the wall with both arms and sighs.) Breathe. Breathe, Jerry.

35 Joanna Newsom, “Monkey & Bear” (2006)

263 JM: I am out here for you. You don’t know what it’s like to be me out here for you! It is an up-at-dawn pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, okay? Just, God, help me. Help me, Rod. Help me help you. (JM kneels in front of Rod.) Help me help you. Help me help you.

RT: (Begins to laugh uproariously.) You are hangin’ on by a very thin thread. And I dig that about you! No contract. Aw, help me help you! Help me help me help help me! That’s my—that’s my man.

JM: Hey. I’m happy to entertain you.

RT: (in a mocking tone, while laughing.) Help me! Help me!

—Jerry Maguire (1996)

The (Straight) White Man as Minstrel Performer and Puppet Master

This notion of entertainment throughout twentieth-century American minstrelsy and contemporary American cinema is closely linked to the power differential between

Black and White Americans since the nineteenth century. Borrowed from the popular

1996 sports-romance film Jerry Maguire, the epigraph above depicts a similar moment regarding a White male’s resentment at being considered entertainment particularly by a

Black male. However, in this case, the Black athlete Rod Tidwell (performed by

Gooding, Jr.) utters the word “dance” to his White male sports agent Jerry Maguire

(performed by Tom Cruise) as a kind of synonym for Black men being forced to ingratiate themselves to the White American public through a kind of “song and dance” in order to assure earning what they believe they rightfully deserve.

I believe the dialogue from this iconic scene from Jerry Maguire, a film released during the height of the White Man Dance trope, points to the cultural nuances behind

American dance and the traumatic wound of minstrelsy. As Robert M. Entman and

264 Andrew Rojecki explain in The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in

America:

On the one hand, [Jerry Maguire] shows a burgeoning closeness between a White and a Black man, one in which each depends on the insights and understanding of the other. Theirs is not the merely professional relationship of polite distance that characterizes many of the interracial friendships we saw on prime-time television. On the other hand, playing a sports agent, Cruise, the eponymous White man, does the intellectual heavy lifting. Although his client, an African American football player client named Rod Tidwell (Gooding) and Rod’s Black wife Marcee both possess a college education (she majored in business), they cannot succeed financially; they are powerless without their agent’s economic wisdom. The chief advice Jerry gives Rod is to act less cynically egotistical about the game of football and to submerge his anger at inferior treatment by the White owner. (2001, 187)

In other words, once more an American film depicts a Black man being asked to labor and “dance” for the White man in power. Additionally, the White male still remains in power financially even while using the body and image of the Black man. When Rod claims he does not “dance,” he is not merely speaking about the literal act of dancing; instead he refers metaphorically to a long history in which Black men must capitulate to

White society in order to get what they deserve.

The dynamic represented in this sequence is one found throughout the analyses of

Act Two, one in which the moving Black body is employed as currency by White men for their own use, mockery, and capital gain. Through this sequence, furthered by the establishment of the divisive intricacies of the impact of nineteenth-century minstrelsy on contemporary American popular culture, one witnesses how the dynamic between Black and White relations have burdened the very notion of “dancing.”

For example, in the analysis of the Lonely Island’s feature-length film Popstar:

Never Stop Never Stopping, I discussed the layers of nuance surrounding the wardrobe

265 malfunction scene and its complex relationship between Black men and White men on the theatrical stage and the cinematic screen. I explored how Popstar: Never Stop Never

Stopping provides a commentary on this historical relationship in American popular culture by subverting the power dynamic between White male pop star Conner and Black hip hop performer Hunter the Hunted. As I discussed in that analysis, the Lonely Island creates a situation in which the White male pop star must unexpectedly rely on the Black musician in order to financially succeed. Further, when the wardrobe change on stage comically fails, emasculating Conner in front of his fan base (and beyond, as the malfunction becomes a trending topic in entertainment news), Conner becomes the butt of the joke, greatly amusing Hunter in particular. It is during this moment in the film

Conner sarcastically makes a statement to Hunter that could be read as addressing this complex relationship between White and Black male performers throughout American popular culture: “I’m so glad I could entertain you” (Schaffer and Taccone 2016).

As addressed earlier in this dissertation, White men were able, through the systemic White male patriarchal society forming American culture, to mock and profit from the Black men who were also often their property in one way or another. In this way, White men profited twice: once as slave owners and then again as the makers of the ethnic mimicry of Blackness. Although Black men (and women) would eventually become creators of minstrelsy performances in order to at least gain back the capital taken from them via their own likeness, American culture and entertainment would never be able to remove or fully recover from these divisive and scarring beginnings regarding the feeling of ownership of Whiteness over Blackness.

266 As shown throughout this dissertation, the wound of minstrelsy can be witnessed and experienced far and wide throughout American popular culture such as in the cases of Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, and the work of John Hughes. However, even in the case of an example considered more nuanced such as the incorporation of Lil Buck’s dancing integrated into Spike Jonze’s film Her, the moving image of the Black male is still largely being used in service of White male identity and for White-owned and directed films. What is the rate of reward-exchange when it comes to power and identity?

In other words, how far have we come if White men not only remain in power but continue to financially profit off the artistry, movement, and labor of Black men?

This problem was most illuminated to me in reflecting on two recent SNL episodes involving Donald Trump. The first was the episode in which Trump performed as host on November 7, 2015, and the second involved the episode which opened with a

Leonard Cohen tribute performed by Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton a year later, the

Saturday after it was revealed Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election. In the first episode mentioned, Trump also performed his own version of the White Man Dance trope, an interpretation of the video for the Black Canadian rapper ’s hit single

“Hot Line Bling.”

After this dissertation’s journey into the complex relationship between Blackness and Whiteness on the American popular cultural stage, I began to wonder about the choices made regarding these two episodes of SNL. In other words, not only did the show provide Trump with a platform during his presidential campaign when they invited him

267 to host one of the most popular shows on television, but I wondered: In doing so, did they ultimately make him less threatening as a White man himself?

After Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton performs a moving tribute of Leonard

Cohen’s “Hallelujah” while playing the piano, McKinnon says earnestly to the camera at the end of the episode’s cold open: “I’m not giving up. And neither should you”

(Saturday Night Live 2016). This moment on American television led me to ask a secondary question: What did it signify when the regular cast of SNL seemed to grieve the outcome of the election after having provided a platform for Trump himself? In other words, what is American popular culture’s ethical responsibility regarding the mocking of White men via Blackness while also continuing to leave all the attention, power, and money with those same hands it attempts to critique?

“We Can Dance If We Want To”36: Reflections on the Current (Straight) White Man Dance in 2018

I began this dissertation by briefly addressing the dancing of actor Matt McGorry who has gradually become known for his own version of the White Man Dance. As mentioned in Act One, McGorry’s contribution to this trope can also be seen in a parody his character performs in a flashback on Orange Is the New Black, which referenced a video of a real YouTube parody in which U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan danced and lip synced to Carly Rae Jepsen’s earlier described explosive single “Call Me Maybe.”

Additionally, McGorry can be found briefly twerking throughout his performance as Asher Millstone in the television show How to Get Away With Murder and in the 2015 music video for Peking Duk’s “Say My Name.” However, I now invoke his words that

36 Men Without Hats, “The Safety Dance” (1983).

268 formed part of the title of this dissertation’s introduction—“Hope you enjoy the strangeness that is me.”—to pose a final question: Can contemporary American popular culture begin to depict White men dancing beyond a spoofing of White American masculinity? Finally, I would like to offer suggestions as where this trope may travel given the changes in the position of power held in mainstream American culture due to the recent rise of gender and cultural subversions in the youth and media.

When Black comedian Eddie Murphy performed his trope-solidifying sketch it was the 1980s. America was in the thrust of paranoia due to fears constellating around the mysterious and pervasive notion of what it meant to be either HIV-positive or to have

AIDS. As I argued throughout this dissertation, to be labeled as unmasculine was often to be labeled as someone who was possibly homosexual as well as someone plagued by this stigmatizing virus. Particularly when performed by men, dance became associated with an emasculated position, one possibly linked to men’s participation in homosexual activity. As addressed throughout this dissertation, masculinities studies scholar Michael

Kimmel argues men must be stoic and immobile in order to exist firmly and safely within

White masculinity. This meant a “masculine” man did not dance.

This triangulation of a White man and his position regarding his sexuality and his gender identity seemed to result in a very particular type of dancing from the White male.

The “worse” a man danced on American popular cultural screens the more a man thus affirmed his position within hegemonic masculinity. It is my argument in this dissertation that many of the men featured found nuanced ways to explore their masculinity in

269 dancing within a kind of liminal position between one state or another, be it masculinity and femininity or boyhood and manhood.

Regardless of how these male figures moved between notions of masculinity and femininity, however, it seems to me the men dancing in these audiovisual texts shared throughout this dissertation were still ultimately appealing to the status quo by toeing the line of the needs of American popular culture. Although these men may have presented less stable gender identities made more complicated by the confusion of gender and sexuality occurring at that time in American history, I do not read these movers or the texts in which they are presented as protesting the structures within which they find themselves: Toxic masculinity and the expectations of masculine ideologies still seem to reign supreme. What would happen, I wonder, if the contemporary American public were to witness White men truly complicate movement and gender, as well as sexuality, on the

American popular cultural screen? If White men were to truly complicate movement and gender, as well as sexuality, on the American popular cultural screen, how would that change the cinematic apparatus constructing these images? How might White men create a new persona, one no longer dependent upon the accepted mimicry of Blackness within

American popular culture?

As discussed throughout this dissertation, the camera constructs a very particular story regarding the way White men move throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in American popular culture. In the early part of the twentieth century, one witnessed the camera include the entire moving body when filming dancer Fred Astaire, for example. In the latter part of the twentieth century, one witnessed the camera truncate

270 the body at certain times in order to provide a very particular type of moving image to the public, one based in physical comedy and steeped in gender and racial ideologies in order to create stylized or parodic images of the White male. As White men specifically not known to be trained dancers began to be filmed for comic effect or to present a certain kind of moving image to the viewer of these White male movers, the camera began to frame the body in particular ways and for particular intentions. What would this new complex image look like in this different age? How would the White male dancer’s movements change when constructed outside of this trope?

It’s a (Wo)Man’s World?: Reflections on the Future (Straight) White Male Dancer

The early history of American popular culture found White men clearly in power.

But even within the last year, remarkable shifts have occurred regarding who now influences how American culture is changing. For example, as a result of the #metoo movement, during which prominent female figures in Hollywood began to speak out about sexual harassment and assault in the American film industry, many White men who had held positions immense power for decades found themselves suddenly ousted from their own companies, films, and other cultural institutions. The most egregious of these cases involved Harvey Weinstein who was not only fired from his own production company, but whose company’s executive board now consists exclusively of women.

Emma Gonzalez, a female student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in

Parkland, , championed a nation-wide school walkout and an international march to fight for gun reform after a shooting at her school killed seventeen people and injured

271 many others. Gonzalez, who not only identifies as bisexual but also as a person of color, has been able to widely influence the American public using the power of social media.

Many shifts are occurring within contemporary American popular culture as well.

In 2015, Puerto Rican playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda created and composed the award- winning, multicultural, hip hop-infused Broadway sensation . In 2018, two

Black filmmakers, Ryan Coogler and Duvernay, surpassed box office records by being the first two Black filmmakers to top the box office with their adaptations of Black

Panther and A Wrinkle in Time. Black Panther is the highest-grossing film of 2018 and the third highest-grossing film in the United States of all time. Additionally, Love, Simon, a film adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s young adult novel Simon and the Homosapien

Agenda, was released in 2018, making it the first mainstream teen film to feature a gay male protagonist. Later this year, John Chu will release Crazy Rich Asians, a film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s bestselling novel exclusively featuring characters of Asian descent from around the world and the first film to feature an exclusively Asian cast in the last twenty-five years.

In terms of contemporary American television, one witnesses a rise in the depiction of multiple races and of differing gender and sexual identities. Crazy Ex-

Girlfriend not only stars a diverse cast (including an Asian American romantic male lead) but also multiplicities of sexual orientation (such as bisexual male and female characters).

Jane the Virgin features an exclusively primary Latinx cast and also includes lesbian and bisexual characters. Several television shows are also portraying trans or gender nonbinary characters, such as Rise, Better Things, and Pose. Clearly, a shift is taking

272 place in American popular culture regarding which bodies are invoking which changes in the American imaginary as a whole. How will these changes affect which movers (and moving images) will dominate our television and film screens in the future? How might these changes impact the balance of power between White and Black performers or male and female performers? Further, how might performers create popular comedy other than through the subtext of belittling a culture other than your own?

A Glimpse Into the Future of the (Straight) White Man Dance: A Few Examples

There are a few dance sequences in recent American popular culture I think give a hint as to what types of moving images we may find developing even further in the future. Indian American , one of the original writers of The Office and the creator and star of the television show The Mindy Project, provides another cross-racial and cross-gendered intervention into the trope. In The Mindy Project, Mindy’s love interest, macho Italian American male Danny Castellano (performed by Chris Messina) performs a sincere choreographed dance to R&B legend Aaliyah’s “Try Again” as a

Christmas gift. The song and accompanying dance signal a change in their relationship, adding a complexity to Danny’s originally hegemonic image of masculinity. In addition, the fact that Danny, consistently portrayed as a man firmly performing within hegemonic masculinity has choreographed and executed a dance for a woman of color, further complicates this moving image by a White man in situational comedy.

Recently, I observed two performances by White male performers I think provide an interesting dialogue to accompany this concluding analysis for this dissertation. In an advertisement for Vitamin Water, ’s Aaron Paul begins dancing on a

273 treadmill after drinking a swig of Water. Although the ad includes elements of movement inspired by Blackness (near the end of the commercial Paul performs arm gestures possibly interpreted as influenced by the Black drag queen style voguing), the dance itself is seemingly seen from the other members of the gym, i.e., the “audience” in the scene, as a positive organic expression of movement rather than a parodic or imitative one. Additionally, the camera depicts the entire dance Paul executes rather than cutting off parts of his body in order to make his dance seem either more comical or more perfectly executed than it is in actuality. In the recent Oscar-nominated film Call Me By

Your Name, White male actor Armie Hammer dances to The Psychedelic Furs’ “Love

My Way” as a bisexual character. Set in the 1980s, Hammer dances in the middle of the dance floor in enthusiastic fervor as he bounces up and down with his eyes closed and pumping his fists in the air. The dance is clearly not meant to be comic, nor does it use

Blackness in order to create parody. In an interview with Hammer and his co-star published in USA Today, Hammer claimed it was “the most difficult scene for me,” yet his co-star humorously insisted Hammer “is an exquisite dancer and actually reduced his dancing ability as a character choice” (Ryan 2017). However, in both of these scenes the movement seems to depict the dancing of White men beyond a mockery of their movement abilities or as an appropriation or unabashed borrowing of another culture’s movement expression.

Two recent examples of drag performances in popular culture hint at the ways in which masculinity can evolve from its current expression within the White Man Dance.

For example, White male actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s sincere drag lip sync dance

274 performance of the choreography performed for the music video for Janet Jackson’s

“Rhythm Nation” on the television show Lip Sync Battle offers a male expression of femininity not situated in denigration or mockery. Another example of this includes

White male actor ’s lip sync dance performance of Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” also performed on Lip Sync Battle. Additionally, White female singer Jenny Lewis’s music video for the song “Just One of the Guys,” featuring actresses Brie Larson, Anne

Hathaway, and Kristen Stewart, offers an image of female masculinity complicating

White masculine movement. Starring Jenny Lewis singing and playing guitar in front of the actresses who also play instruments while wearing mustaches and feminine suits, the video especially intervenes in the embodiment of the White Man Dance trope when including brief solo performances of each woman dancing in comic impersonations of

White men. Another similar example includes the music video for ’s song “Girls Chase Boys,” a clear homage to Robert Palmer’s video for “Simply

Irresistible,” in which Michaelson’s video replaces the female performers in the video with men dressed almost identically to those in Palmer’s video including full makeup.

These popular cultural moments hint at the possible future trajectories of the

White Man dance as well as future definitions of how White masculinity intersects with vernacular dance. As contemporary American culture becomes more inclusive of a multiplicity of masculinities, I suspect American popular culture’s imaging of those masculinities will only become more complex in turn. What will White men dancing look like when American media, film, and television is composed of more than primarily cis men performing traditional representations of heterosexuality and masculine behavior

275 performed and constructed within Black moving images to Black-identified songs situated in music genres such as soul, R&B, jazz, and hip hop? How will transgender identity offer a new lens through which to view masculinity as well as masculine dancing? Finally, how will the growing inclusion of all ethnicities, especially those situated within a fully American landscape and identity (rather than the dominant immigrant-based narrative), affect how dance is negotiated in popular culture? It is my hope and estimation that as contemporary American media becomes more inclusive of all

American bodies, genders, and sexualities, masculinity can only become more nuanced in its depiction in American popular culture. Dance’s role as constitutive of ideological rendering, then, will offer even more ways to see the relationship between body and identity.

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